About us, why are we doing games?
Hey there,
I am Clem, a Frenchy game dev that moved in Montreal, Canada in 2013. I am the Founder and Creative Director of PlayTogether Studio.
It may sounds corny, but I left Europe back then because I had a dream, I wanted to work in videogames. After a few years in a big AAA Studio, I decided that it was time to make things on my own.
I live with this philosophy of work: keep a total creative freedom, impact the world in a beneficial way and keep free time for my family.
How to reach these objectives without taking risk? Well that’s impossible… but this is the only path that will give me a real sense of fulfillment. This is a life where passion and work are intertwined, a life that I dreamt of when
I joined the videogame industry 7 years ago.
With the deep desire to improve the world around me one pixel at a time, I share my time on games for doctors and researchers in order to make patient treatments more efficient and enjoyable, especially for mental health issues and
respiratory diseases.
The other part of my work, way lighter, is the creation of cooperative multiplayer games with the first one being Mad Experiments: Escape Room.
Background story
As far I can remember, I have always been a gamer. First on console, then around 10 years old I got my first PC (Pentium I with 32 MB of RAM FTW!).
I discovered the world of multiplayer games. Warcraft 2 & 3, Starcraft, Diablo, CS, Battlefield, DAoC, WoW etc.
I started to attend LAN parties of 100+ players at around 12 years old.
I also had a group of friends that loved multiplayer games, and at some point we were doing LANs almost every weekend!
During these years, I developed a deep passion for cooperative games because we were all together fighting for a common goal. The feeling was amazing and these LANs were filled with countless hilarious moments.
(This period surely plays a major role in my decision 15 years later when I started PlayTogether Studio, an indie studio focused on cooperative games).
After a few years of studying Business, I decided to go to Montreal with the only objective to get into video games. Back then my background was in Business so I used that card. It took me 6 months to finally land a marketing job in a 5-person indie team.
Everyday I got exposed to Unity and the code of the game, I also did my share of Game Design, UI, etc. That’s the pleasure of working in the same small office, you get to know everything that happens in the production!
That helped me to understand the art of crafting small games more than any other experience.
Indie world is a tough one, and only few of us survive after the first year… The first studio I worked with didn’t…
I worked with other indies for a few years (none of them still exist). At some point I felt that it was time to change environment and got an opportunity at a AAA studio. It was crazy, first days always are. I was used to work with
a maximum of 10 people, now my team size was in the hundreds!
I was lucky enough to be in a very friendly team where veterans would help (and sometimes mentor) juniors like me. I learnt so much about everything, from game design and systems interactions to level art and level design.
These years with indies and AAA forged me into what I am today.
It took me a long time before getting the motivation and really allocate the time needed to learn and start to make small games.
Now I want to use my knowledge from indie to AAA studios to push to boundaries of what games should be: a form of art that brings us together and makes us better.
Thank you for reading this far! <3
Feel free to join our Discord and poke me to have a chat 🙂
