Carte Blanche

Development information from February 2026

Steam asked me to make some corrections in order to improve the experience of the game for Steam players, which I gladly accepted.

However, you will probably have to wait for the next major update of Carte Blanche, which I will try to publish as soon as possible.

Thank you for your interest! See you very soon!

Mehdi

• The playable game is a prototype and is still in development. The story, the mechanics and the possibilities have been deliberately reduced and simplified as much as possible (visible in full in the trailer), in order to be made available to the players as quickly as possible in early access and so that you can participate, if you wish, at its construction.

What is this game about?

This game is an adventure game in "point and click" whose goal will be to develop, the story, the world and the characters and to collect cards, to improve them in order to win Tournaments like chess games and to win prizes in the game to solve other challenges.

The universe of this game takes place in another time and another world, very different from ours in many aspects. Magic and the extraordinary are not a taboo here.

Two children who love each other will have to cross an extraordinary world and discover with their cards, their true power. You play as the young hero (the female accolyte character is not yet playable in the prototype version of the game) and you travel the world in search of Cards, which will allow you to participate in Tournaments. You cannot leave your village for now.

Reminder: the game and the story of the game are still in prototype, the current possibilities fully visible in the trailer are therefore to:

• Collect and improve cards, in order to win tournaments

• Be curious, this world reveals many things

  

Why and how did I create this game?

Early 2023 and without a job, I looked for different ways to develop myself and create something that allows me to express myself. So I studied the C and C++ language, as well as 3D with Blender, sound with CSound, and the design of video games.

Who am I?

I am a Frenchman who lives in the Champagne region (like something bottled that was invented here). Graduated as an electronics technician but always passionate about science, I joined the university to study physics but not having enough money I had to work as a computer security consultant that I had been studying since adolescence because it was an inexpensive scientific field. 

I grew up with Japanese animes like Dragon Ball, where I was always amazed by how it was possible to communicate so many emotions with simple drawings, caricaturing, pushing to the extreme ideas and imagination that expressed suffering, beauty, courage and love.

So I had some knowledge to be able to create video games but no experience or any diploma in this field. I have therefore studied the field of video games since 2023 on my own and thanks to the knowledge shared by many enthusiasts, free software, and the work of Steam, I was able to create this first game and share it with you.

What is the development status of the game?

I started writing the game’s code, at the end of October 2023, when I began to study C/C++, and the first arts still included in the game, at the end of February 2024, then more than a year of more or less conclusive trials before finding a good style. The character creation, the modeling of the current environment, and the shaders in an anime style were started in February 2025.

This game was designed with the philosophy of "improvise and start again", despite two years of continuous research to find how to do what I wanted. I think we can understand what I tried to do in the end. 

I am currently working on the animations (I think it shows) trying to preserve as faithfully as possible, as for the scenery, the 2D animated effect. Which is more difficult than it seem.

All the characters, animals and monsters, have been scupted, painted, articulated, and animated by hand without any reference. Except for the proportions of the female face and the gold hue in animes, everything else was done from my imagination and memory only. The purpose of this, besides producing curious (or hilarious) results, was to maximize my expressivity through this game and create new animal species apparently.

The environment is geometrically created with my own shaders in order to maximize the work of light and create this double style of Japanese anime.

The sounds and music were created with free software CSound in order to eventually create unique sounds. Some sounds are spatialized to make the atmosphere more and more immersive.

The programming of the game is made in C, C++ (C way) and SIMD with free software Emacs, uses multi-processor parallelism and OpenGL for the graphics card, without external library (except Windows, standard C library and OpenGL at the moment) with the aim of maximizing the performance, quality, and originality of the game.

The next steps are therefore to:

• Make qualitative and expressive animations and in particular facial animations

• Make the maximum of clickable and interactive things

• Allow the development and progression of the story (not yet possible in the prototype version of the game) by including many other characters and making the female character (your current accolyte) playable;

• Develop a non-repeating and much more interactive sound atmosphere, and real interesting music (what you had the privilege of listening to in the trailer, it was just me.. testing CSound.. by clicking with a mouse.. on the virtual tiny MIDI keyboard.. while recording me.). I have planned to study music theory as soon as possible

• Create ways to adjust and customize the environment and characters

• Create many more cards and powers describing the complete universe of the game

(The playable game will be available as soon as possible). Thanks for reading!