Womenize! – Inspiring Stories is our weekly series featuring inspirational individuals from games and tech. For this edition we talked to Coline Sauvand,  Co-Founder & Artistic Director at Ram Ram Studio. She speaks about how moving to Brussels, art school, a competition win, and quitting her job were key steps in her journey to becoming an illustrator and artistic director. Read more about Coline here: 
Hi Coline! Looking back at your early days as an illustrator, what were some of the key decisions or risks you took that significantly impacted your career trajectory?

🔥 The spark was to come and live in Brussels. At the time, I thought it was a random post-adolescence move. ( I lived in Montpellier back then ) Today, I realize that it was the most important decision I ever made to become an illustrator. Brussels is a very open city, with a strong pictorial and alternative culture. Everyone is welcome, there’s plenty of room for you.

⚙️ I joined an art school, and for 3 years I had 3 hours a week of live drawing sessions: it’s mega important to connect your hand, your eye and your brain together. That was the technical key. 

🧿 Then I entered a “travel book” competition and won a trip to Istanbul. There I visited an exhibition of “Persian miniatures”, traditional images that illustrated 15th-century Persian tales. It was so different from what I was used to that it deeply inspired me; I decided to tell my journey through them, copying them. That was my “style key”😎. It also inspired the videogame “30 birds” I’m releasing at the end of the year!

📢 Finally, the decisive key was quitting my part-time job to take advantage of a full year‘s unemployment benefit: I had time to take more commissions, create my website, prototype my children’s book and my video game. 

Can you describe a typical day in your life as an artistic director at Ram Ram Game Studio? How do you manage your time and tasks to ensure both creative output and project management are effectively balanced?

The question couldn’t be more pertinent! I’m always between management and design. 

To keep my hand on the creative side of the project, I allocate enough design tasks to myself that I have to do them, and remain an artist on the project, not just a manager!

But I have to admit that it’s not always easy to maintain the balance. 

I share my office with the creative director and the programmers, so I know what needs to be prototyped, modified or polished.

My role is to steer the creative process towards production needs by sharing visuals, guidelines and technical requirements.

I usually start the day by giving feedback on what was shared the day before (via Discord). Then I check the tasks and see if any priorities need to be changed. ( We use Notion ). The artistic team is made up of +/- 5 people, including me: two 2D designers, a 3D designer and 2 animators: in-game animation and cutscene animation (depending on production periods). 

A word of advice: I listen to NTS radio a lot to stay positive. 🙂

As also being an author and illustrator of children’s books, how do you approach the creative process differently in your games compared to your books? What are the unique challenges and rewards of each medium?

I think there are as many ways of making books as there are of making video games!  I can only talk about mine: for my book, I started with a strong LOVE that I wanted to share: for “La Tribu Débrouillon”, it was the DIY concept. I drew some characters, which allowed me to define their personalities: how they might react and evolve. Then I started writing and storyboarding. At this stage, I had the overall shape of the project. The illustration part then proceeded in a linear process. 

For my game “30 Birds”, it was totally different. First of all, there were two of us, with Laurent, my partner: we began the journey with an interactive painting, and that was the solid concept of the project: an interactive experience in a magical and colorful world. When we saw how the public reacted, we turned the project towards a video game. And it was only then that we had to find a genre, develop a story and come up with relevant game mechanics! At that point, nothing has ever been less linear: we’ve always had to stay dynamic, because we had to iterate a lot!

I could say we did things backwards. But in both cases,🔥 I had a fire 🔥 and, as my mom says, when you have a fire, you can cook anything. Or maybe it was about burning patriarchal society to the ground? Either way, you can already wishlist my video game 30 Birds on steam and order my book “La Tribu Débrouillon” in your favorite bookshop! 

Thanks for this interview, Coline!

Coline’s links: LinkedIn, Website

Womenize! – Inspiring Stories Feature by Madeleine Egger