In part one of this feature based on my day spent at the White Birds offices recently, co-founder and marketing manager Michel Bams admitted that the studio's future might be in different genres, or even outside of games entirely. But as revealed in part two, with a whopping five new adventures in various stages of planning or production, there seems to be no danger of the company giving up on the genre any time soon. Still, true to their word of seeking newer, bolder ways to express themselves, White Birds are indeed exploring other creative avenues as storytellers.

Beyond adventures

While Nikopol and Sinking Island are currently in full development, White Birds are already toying with various other ideas for the future. Two projects in particular are being studied, both more or less outside the field of adventure games. One is a campsite management game, still in a very early stage of pre-production. While featuring the usual mechanics found in similar games (buying land, building all sorts of facilities, etc.), the game should contain various story-oriented features, such as managing tensions between different styles of customers.

The other is codenamed Birdy and has been in Benoît Sokal's mind for a long time. As you may expect from its title, it casts the player as a bird, living a bird's life: getting out of the egg, learning how to fly and ride air streams, hunting, building a family and protecting it... Birdy is targeted at consoles, with more of an action-adventure gameplay. Still, Michel Bams made it very clear that the game would be heavily story-driven and would primarily be about making the player care about what happens to the winged protagonist.

Another project that has been in the works for some time is Aquarica, a story about a search for mythical whales so big that they appear as islands to those seeing them. Imagined by Benoît Sokal and fellow comic artist François Schuiten, Aquarica's story was originally meant to be told through a variety of media. Still, most of these projects, including the game version of Aquarica, have been put on the back burner while White Birds focus on turning Sokal and Schuiten's story into a 3D computer generated movie.

"It's an ambitious project that we've long been eager to work on," explains Bams. "We're not interested in making an art house film that only a handful of people will see. We want to do something impressive, and expect a budget of over 20 million €." White Birds have partnered with Duran Duboi, a French company that worked on the CG effects of films such as Enki Bilal's Immortal and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie, to create a short pilot that should be ready in October. They then hope to use it to convince movie studios to fund the full project.



Towards real-time 3D

Whether Aquarica-the-game will see the light of day or not, White Birds are certainly not done with gaming. They are already looking far ahead and, technologically speaking, their future lies with an ambitious endeavour called "Play All". Play All is a project of Cap Digital, a Paris-based public-private initiative focusing on novel CGI technologies. Founded by three French studios, Dark Works (Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare), Kylotonn (Bet on Soldier) and White Birds, now joined by various other companies, Play All aims at creating a real-time 3D game engine that is modular enough to fit various types of projects and platforms (from next-gen consoles to cell phones).

With a finished product expected in a couple of years, White Birds logically hope to use that engine for Birdy. But does this mean potential future adventure game projects would go that way too? "You can now get the same graphical quality with real-time 3D as with pre-rendered 3D", answers Bams, "so there's no reason for us not to go with the flow. But using real-time 3D doesn't necessarily mean giving complete freedom to the player. Nothing prevents us from deciding where to put the camera or where the player can go explore. This switch is more about giving us more freedom when designing the gameplay and the game's cinematic feel."

Still, even with an existing engine, making a real-time 3D game requires an increased budget that only some big publishers can provide. What future, then, does that leave for adventures at White Birds? "Nowadays, when big publishers hear the word 'adventure', they don't reach for their chequebook. Maybe it's just a matter of semantics; indeed, we're pitching Sinking Island as a 'detective' game. And maybe we'll have to move to something else. But we know that there are things we know how to do, and things we don't. Don't ask Benoît to create a shooter; he might make it a beautiful shooter, but that's really not what we do at White Birds. What we do is tell stories."

Lofty ambitions

Adventure Gamers last met Michel Bams and Olivier Fontenay over a year ago, and this notion of "being primarily storytellers" was already evident even then, though few probably understood its full implications then. In the interval, several new adventures have been started, but Aquarica, the project that was probably closest to the Amerzone–Syberia vein, got put on hold in its game incarnation — and it's impossible not to relate that to the disappointing reception of Paradise. It's also clear that the setback has forced the company to question where it wants to go exactly.

What really struck me about White Birds, on top of the obvious passion for the work being done, was the incredibly strong ambition that drove the people there. This is not a company that will resign itself to thinking small. Instead, it has pretty much resigned itself, though without bitterness, to the realization that traditional adventure gaming may not offer the proper framework to fulfil its highest ideals. That outlook might sound bittersweet to some adventure gamers' ears, and it doesn't mean that adventure games hold no future for them at all. But it is quite typical of the way of thinking of a company that desires to explore vast territories, to soar as high as it can, and refuses to be bound by habits and expectations.

And could you expect otherwise from a company named White Birds?