Blêktre 2081 is the second game in the Blêktre series.
The first Blêktre (which I call Blêktre 1) was developed in 2015, initially during my working hours as a web developer in a t-shirt printing company, but it quickly spilled over into my free time. It was my very first game, developed in PHP and illustrated in Flash, with code that was really quite shaky.
Under a vaguely “visual novel” appearance clearly inspired by “choose your own adventure” books, it was actually an adventure game whose particularity was that it was asynchronous multiplayer — other players would soon take on the roles of the various characters in the story through a “roles” system.
You played as a huge loser, a drug addict who quickly became unemployed, and your biggest goal was to seduce Josiane, a capricious woman courted by all the players since everyone was in the same instance, putting everyone in direct competition.
For a free, ugly, poorly coded game available only in French, its success was greater than expected. Thanks to the promotion I did on the comic blog I was running at the time, about 5,000 players created an account in the two years after its release. But the most amusing part was that well-known author Nathalie Quintane decided to turn it into a play, and recognized contemporary director Yves-Noël Genod actually staged it, which incidentally introduced me to the existence of contemporary theatre.
In short, this game was a strange oddity.
Fifteen years passed and the times changed. The crude humor and misogynistic jokes of Blêktre 1 aged poorly, and Flash ceased to be supported by browsers. It was time to dismantle Blêktre 1 — it had run its course.
Over the next decade, I kept honing my development skills and produced several prototypes.
The development of Blêktre 2081
In 2023, I decided to start developing Blêktre 2081, a sort of modernized variant.
I applied for a grant to support artistic creation (from the city where I live: Rennes), and it seems the satirical and bizarre nature of this game made it valid as an artistic work, since the funding was granted. It’s still a strange game, not built for the market: you can see it as a social experiment exploring the effects of capitalism on individuals.
The concept was as follows: keeping the asynchronous multiplayer and caustic narrative of the first game (no anti-princess to seduce this time, but rather a rotten society to dominate, exploring its generally grim facets) along with a satirical sci-fi backdrop, I wanted to create a truly living little world with an economy and a population that never sleeps — like an aquarium players can enter and leave at will, climbing the different strata of this micro-society, from beggar to tycoon.
To do this, I evolved the “roles” system from the first Blêktre into the ability to take over entire businesses. Each business meets a real need in the game (for example: providing food, shelter, toilets). The inhabitants of Blêktreville (players or bots) then consume in these businesses and enrich their owners, in a sort of Monopoly. As a player-owner, you earn money even when you’re offline because your businesses run 24/7. And the worst part? The more businesses you own, the more your profits are multiplied — simulating real-life snowball wealth accumulation.
But it wouldn’t have been fun to let the first rich player dominate the game forever, so I developed an entire arsenal of counter-powers to overturn the balance. Poor players can ally, rob, burgle, and poison big entrepreneurs to get rich and buy businesses in turn. Competition can therefore remain fierce.
The release
Thanks to good progress in development, playtests, and the game’s exposure, I eventually decided to publish it on Steam.
And now ? A massive expansion is now planned of the end of the year. Stay tuned for details.
