Overcoming Challenges: The Journey of En Garde Developers in Founding a Studio

The surprise hit of the Future Games Show, En Garde, is a vibrant fencing action game where players take on the role of Adalia de Volador, a skilled swashbuckler. The game's lighthearted tone and polished visuals captured the attention of many players, making it one of the most popular demos during the 2023 Steam Next Fest. Initially, En Garde began as a graduation project by the eight co-founders of Fireplace Games at Supinfogame Rubika in France, which was later uploaded to itch.io. The team received an overwhelming response, with many people expressing their liking for the game and publishers and investors showing interest. CEO Anaïs Simonnet recalls, 'We didn't think about doing anything more with it at first. Actually, when we put it online, we had a lot of messages from people who told us they liked it, and publishers and investors were also really interested in it. That was a surprise for us.' Concept artist and writer Julien Fenoglio adds, 'While there is a continuity, it's not like we went out of school, got good feedback, and then founded Fireplace Games. Each of us spent about two years either working in bigger studios or freelancing. It was this time that gave us ideas on how we wanted to run a studio, because we had a taste of how bigger studios operate and how other people were doing.' The team's journey to establishing Fireplace Games was not triggered by a single incident but was rather a gradual process. Simonnet describes herself and her co-founders as a group of developers who were slowly but surely looking for something new. 'I think everyone in the team has different reasons to join the adventure. I know that, for me, it was that I wasn't feeling really good in my job. And I started to realise that the gaming industry was not as ideal as I thought when I was a student and I had a strong desire to one day make something else, just to try to launch my own company and try to do it differently,' Simonnet says. The team's experience working in bigger studios and freelancing for about two years was vital in shaping their vision for Fireplace Games. They learned more about game design and marketing, realising that their initial game could be improved in many ways. Simonnet, who originally trained as a character artist, took on the challenge of becoming the CEO of Fireplace Games, a role she considers to be an ongoing learning process. 'There's a lot of theory you can learn from books and YouTube videos, and at first that's what we did, just to learn the vocabulary of running a business, none of which you learn at game design schools,' she says. Simonnet now views her shift from a creative capacity to managing a studio as permanent, something she describes as a better fit for her than character design. 'I realised that a lot of character artists in games focus completely on being artists, and I don't have the same creative drive,' she admits. 'I'm really good at understanding people's wants and sympathising with them and helping them make something happen. I might not be the best artist, but I'm really good at understanding creative processes and the practical aspects behind them.' Asking the right questions is essential to Simonnet, who describes herself as more of a facilitator than a leader. 'I'm not the kind of CEO with a big vision that I want others to follow,' she says. 'It's the other way around. I listen to what everyone wants to make, and then I find a compromise and make decisions that are good for all of us.' Compromising and communicating in particular is a skill Simonnet wants more people in games to develop, no matter their role. 'You can be very good on a technical level, but if you can't communicate to other people what you're doing and if you can't find a way to make teamwork work, then that's a problem and it's a big problem in our industry,' she says. Fenoglio, who was an art student at Rubika, has also taken up another role, and is now both a writer and a concept artist. However, he doesn't consider this change to be particularly radical. 'I've started as art director for the studio, then I ended up more of a writer, but I'm also a concept artist – I've always stayed in the purview of art craftsmanship, so it's not a huge shift,' he says. Simonnet and Fenoglio believe in En Garde's potential for success because they stuck to what they know – it is a game talking about swashbuckling, a large part of French culture, even though the game itself is set in Spain. Because it is an action game with a strong focus on combat, both describe En Garde's overall narrative potential as 'limited'. However, the team willingly set and accepted these limits, and it was important to Fireplace Games to state their values in their work wherever possible. 'It was an interesting challenge,' Fenoglio says. 'We know that the medium we work in can be quite limited. The verbs you use to interact with in the game are limited, and that's where our game shines. But it also means the only way to bring topics like sexism up is by enemies remarking on the fact that Adalia is a woman, and what's that going to do? You beat them, that's not a meaningful revenge.' Simonnet adds, 'Our character is a bisexual woman because that's what I can speak to. I thought it was nice for a player to see a woman kicking butt, because we know what it's like when a woman is just doing her thing and gets harassed, it feels good to have her fight back.' The team's company motto, 'Making games with panache', is an entire business philosophy. 'It's a word to describe what we did, really – being given money to make a game as juniors in the industry can be overwhelming, and even with all the preparation we did, things can go wrong, so we thought, okay, at least we'll all be doing it together, let's try to have fun,' Simonnet says. For the studio, panache is about being brave, taking risks, and having fun. 'We could have followed a more long-term strategy for the studio. Make a few small games first, take a careful approach. But we were too impatient, we're immediately making what for us is a big game. We have the option to say: if it doesn't work, we'll do something else,' Simonnet explains. The team's approach to making games is centered around their motto, and they hope to inspire others to adopt a similar philosophy.