Coming from Blue Banshee and Ankama Games, Maliki: Poison of the Past is a unique mix of exploration, temporal riddles and turn-based fights full of surprises. The game launched on April 22 to invite players to join Maliki and her wacky family to fight against the Poison. As Sand, you can travel through the ages to defeat this plant monster and repair the space-time continuum. Check out our review to find out more!
We had a chance to sit down with the developers from Blue Banshee and ask them some questions about how Maliki: Poison of the Past began, and what served as inspirations to bring the game from its initial concept to the current, finished state.
Gamespace: Hello! We’re grateful for having this chance to chat with you. Please, introduce yourselves and tell us a bit about Blue Banshee studio.
Etienne: Hi, I’m Etienne Jacquemain, CEO and co-founder of Blue Banshee.
Souillon: Hello. I’m Souillon, author of the Maliki comics and novels for 20 years, co-founder of Blue Banshee as well, and artistic and writing director on the game.
Etienne: Back in the early days of the Nintendo DS, I was looking for a skilled artist to create a series of 2D characters for a game I was designing. I already knew and loved the webcomic Maliki, so I dared to send Souillon an email – at first comically assuming he was a girl – to ask him if he’d like to work with me.
Souillon: It was always fun working with Etienne. They weren’t necessarily very personal games – we mainly worked on games with dolphins! haha – but we always managed to inject originality and humor into them… We were on the same wavelength and had the same deliriums.
Etienne: Then remained good friends after that, made a few concepts together about game ideas, but we kept coming back to the idea of making a video game in the Maliki universe. We even exchanged a few notes and game design documents, until one day we had the opportunity to do it for real! We created Blue Banshee studio together, with the goal of making games on the IP Maliki, but also to create new IPs. We wanted to make it a good place for creative people. We’re now a dozen highly skilled professionals, working remotely from everywhere in France and in Belgium, and we meet several times a year to spend some good time and share ideas.
Gamespace: How did Maliki start? Do you remember that one idea or a feature that later spiralled and snowballed into the creation of the entire game?
Souillon: I think the trigger was a crowdfunding campaign I ran for one of my comics. To animate this campaign, I had created little pixel art animations based on my characters and a little scenario: the more people took part in the campaign, the more they contributed to growing a magic tree and moving the story forward. People really liked the story, and some of them began to ask for a Maliki video game. I figured there was an expectation.
When we set about creating the Maliki game, this magic tree to grow became a central element of the gameplay. Originally, I draw blog anecdotes, into which I introduce supernatural elements. So I was very keen on making a game that wasn’t just another isekai, but one that really took place in the real world, in France, in existing places and times.
Gamespace: How closely does the game stick to the webcomic? Would you advise reading it before trying Poison of the Past, or can the game be enjoyed to the fullest as a standalone?
Souillon: The game’s storyline, although fully integrated into the Maliki universe, is aimed primarily at people who know nothing about the license. That was my main point. Not to make a game for fans. On the contrary, I wanted to surprise them, with something unexpected for them that they wouldn’t be able to understand either without playing the game. It was a balancing act, but I’m very happy with the result. People who know nothing about Maliki can immerse themselves in the game without the apprehension of missing something, and long-time fans will discover a brand-new adventure, and gradually understand what led the characters to evolve in such a drastically different way.
The tone is also very personal, oscillating between humor, dark moments and deeper reflection. We ask ourselves many questions about humanity’s place in nature, about family, and about how far we are prepared to go to protect it. These are themes that speak to everyone, I think, whether they know my work or not.
Etienne: As an early fan and reader of Maliki, I can tell you that none of what I read before in the webcomic could prepare me for what’s in the game!
Gamespace: How long have you been working on the game? Did it change massively over the development time compared to your initial vision?
Etienne: It’s been almost three years of hard work, which includes creating the company and hiring the team, but considering the amount of details that we managed to cram in the game, it wasn’t that long! We managed to keep the main focus on narration and turn-based combat practically intact, but we did change some major elements. At first, we wanted a much more complex set of activities in the Domain, but we figured out that they could have slowed down or sometimes even stopped the adventure, so we toned that aspect down a bit. We also added more puzzles in the levels, with a combination of mechanics spread between the player characters, because we wanted to emphasize the cooperation within the team and make the progression more interesting.
Souillon: Inevitably, some of the content had to be cut. If I’d listened to myself, I’d have written a saga! But I’m happy because when I look at the game today, I don’t feel frustrated or like it’s missing anything. We’ve skimmed a few things off the top, often refining them for the better, but the main thing is still there!
Gamespace: What was the most memorable moment of development for you? What was the biggest challenge you remember facing?
Souillon: My biggest challenge by far was writing for a video game. I usually write in a linear fashion. Here, I had to think in branches, cutting everything up into little pieces that had to remain coherent even if you discovered them in a different order. It was a difficult birth.
Doing all the 2D illustrations of the characters and their chara design was also a big job, because I really wanted to rework the characters in depth, to make them different from the ones people thought they knew, both visually and psychologically. I wore far too many hats on this project, and several times found myself being the bottleneck slowing down the whole team. It was pretty stressful…
But every time I discovered an animation, a cutscene, an FX or we received new music, I was ecstatic. From the start, I’d had a vision of a boss battle set to music, with an original song and instrumentation that evolved in real time during the fight. I remember the incredulous reactions when I first mentioned it, haha. That we managed, thanks to the combined talents of the whole team, to have this moment in the final game is a great source of pride. And I sometimes watch livestreams just for that moment, when players discover this passage. Their reaction alone usually justifies all the trouble we went through to get there.
Etienne: For me, one big moment was to discover the scope of the adventure, once Souillon finally completed the script, because it was way more ambitious that what I was expecting! Reading the synopsis with the team, we were excited because it was dense, it looked so cool and full of awesome key moments and memorable characters and places, but at the same time it was a bit scary, because we thought “now we have to find the way to make it become real!”
Oh, and also the moment I discovered the fantastic OST, that really gave me goose bumps! Our musician is the leader of the group Starrysky and together with Souillon, they did something magical, mixing many sorts of influences.
Gamespace: Why did your choice fall on the turn-based battle model?
Etienne: I think we always wanted to give the game a taste of old-fashion Golden Sun or Chrono Trigger combats, but with a bunch of cool twists. We’re both retrogamers, we love collecting old game systems and we love adventure games, so this choice felt natural.
Souillon: I’m a gamer from the super Nintendo era, and I was very influenced at the time by games like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy. I’ve always loved the tactical aspect of turn-based games, which give you time to think, look for the enemy’s weaknesses and work out a strategy with a clear head. You can’t rush me too much, haha. But I was also very aware of the weariness that this style of combat could sometimes provoke. That’s why we took great care to make it as dynamic as possible, and to dust it off by adding some of our own mechanics, such as temporal manipulation of the timeline, which lets you influence the order in which enemies and allies pass through to create combos, defense sequences and other wacky, more surprising temporal effects! I wanted to make a turn-based RPG that brought something new to the genre, without simply copying and pasting.
Gamespace: Now that Version 1.0 is out, what are your future plans for the game? Are you thinking about DLC?
Etienne: We’re still releasing patches to polish the game experience. And there are still a lot of stories to tell after the first game ends!
Souillon: First and foremost, this first game has to please. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no shortage of ideas. The end is open, so whether it’s DLC or a sequel, anything’s possible! But that will depend entirely on the success of the game.
Gamespace: Thank you, we appreciate the opportunity for this interview. Is there anything you would like to add for our readers?
Etienne: Thank you so much for asking us! I think we managed to create a very original game, with many funny and moving moments and a lot of new things to discover, so I hope that your readers will give it a chance and appreciate it!
Souillon: This game, despite its modest budget, is a compendium of know-how, inspiration and hard work. It’s made from the heart, and from the initial feedback we’ve received, I think that message has got through. It’s an experience full of emotion and humor, and one that appeals to a very wide audience, as the themes addressed are numerous and universal. It’s an intense experience that we didn’t want to dilute with fedex quests or grind. It’s sincere work.
Now we have to make sure we stand out among the blockbusters and the swarm of new games, because the competition is fierce. We need a combination of luck, curiosity, goodwill… and communication, of course. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this game will find its audience. Don’t hesitate to test our free demo on steam to get an idea! Thank you very much!
