Summer in the City: A Montreal Adventure Inspired by Amélie

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How can we make drawing fun for people who don’t have any artistic talent? Game developers have come up with a few answers, or at least they’ve tried. There’s the straightforward approach, like Mario Paint. There, players are given a mouse accessory and a creation tool similar to Microsoft Paint, Okami sees painter’s brushes used as weapons and magic wands in a Zelda-like world, and The Unfinished Swan sees the world (and story) slowly revealed to them by the player’s splattered ink.

Été, an upcoming painting game, aims to give players the feeling that they are making the world more beautiful than the process of putting a picture on a canvas. The game makes painting a breeze. “Like many games, Été uses role-playing to realize a fantasy – the fantasy of being a painter – by assuming that the player’s avatar is already a talented painter,” says creative director Lazlo Bonin. “Painting in Été isn’t about skill, it’s about creativity and fun.”

Bonin was born and raised in Montreal, Canada, where the game is set. He loved the city’s beautiful summers. “After months of harsh winter, the city suddenly comes alive during this season, and everyone seems to try to enjoy the moment as much as possible,” he says. Été is French for both “summer” and “something that’s gone by,” expressing the nostalgic, rose-tinted memories of childhood summers.

The game didn’t originally start out as a painting game; it became one because it seemed the most natural way to tell a story surrounded by nostalgic beauty. The mishmash of aesthetic influences includes the 1998 French children’s game “Uncle Ernest’s Secret Album,” which inspired Eté’s canvas designs, and the film “Amelie,” which influenced the game’s atmosphere. Bonin calls the game a “celebration of the bliss of the everyday” in an “ideal city.”

In Été, painting is fun because it’s a means to explore and understand the environment around you. As players walk through the city, they beautifully paint their surroundings. Think Super Mario Sunshine with a water gun to remove dirt, but in reverse. “By using paint, we’ve made walking and exploring active instead of passive,” Bonin says. “You need to paint to reveal the shapes and colors of the world around you. This makes you pay much more attention to your surroundings than if the world was already revealed and colored for you.”

Été’s canvas also offers more creative freedom, functioning more like a simpler art tool, letting you paint whatever you want, and Bonin says the game’s 2D creation tools, shown off in the pre-release demo, have already inspired some highly detailed artwork.

Bonin hopes that the game’s focus on finding beauty in everyday places will inspire a similar impulse in the real world. “A close friend once told me that Été is a game of ‘seeing, not seeing, and listening, not hearing,'” Bonin says. And what better time for the release than the middle of a Montreal summer?