AMA / The Merlies - Ask us anything about our game: The Merlies! The team is here to answer ! 🐦🌱

[u/No_External_9780]

Hello r/NintendoSwitch**! We’re the team behind The Merlies! 🐦🌱**

We are Darjeeling, a small independent studio based in Paris, and today four of us are here to answer your questions:

• Thomas Sandmeier (Game Designer)
• Florence Rivières (Narrative designer) - https://bsky.app/profile/rivieresflo.bsky.social
• Xavier Thiry (Music composer – OST)
• Marc Lustigman, (Creative producer and co-founder of Darjeeling)

The Merlies is a “wholesomevania” where you help a tribe of tiny, fragile birds find each other after a great storm, in a cozy solarpunk world where humanity’s forgotten junk becomes their treasure. There are no enemies and almost no pressure: you progress through solidarity.

The project started to grow in 2022. Back Then Cosmografik was filing entire Moleskine notebooks with sketches of little birds (back then, they were called the ‘Tinies’ / xsee below). The concept was lovely: a tribe of anthropomorphic birds, adorable yet fragile, who emerge from the ground to build a community in a world where humanity is nothing more than a vanished civilization.

We literally fell in love with the characters, but also with the promise of their world. It just felt right: behind the softness of the drawings and their childlike charm, there was something tragic, something deeply melancholic. That paradox won us over straight away. In these tiny creatures living in a world far too big for them, we saw a metaphor for ourselves, a humanity being offered a second chance. What if we could live together differently? Live in greater harmony with nature? Put the joy of small things back at the heart of our lives?

Deep down, the Merlies spoke to us about solidarity, about the art of turning fragility into strength, and about the ability to find contentment in simple things, like marveling at the beauty of the world, something that feels so distant from our modern lives today.

The Merlies launched on Steam and Nintendo Switch on September 29.

Please ask us anything ! We’ll be happy to reply !

TRAILER : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xfq6RPIYLi4
BUY IT ON SWITCH : https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/the-merlies-switch/
BUY IT ON STEAM : https://store.steampowered.com/app/2521160/The_Merlies

OFFICIAL COVER

1st Concept Art from Céline Veltman - https://www.celineveltman.com

1st sketches of the Merlies from Cosmografik

1st sketches of the Merlies from Cosmografik

1st sketches of the Merlies from Cosmografik

[u/Asleep_University_40]

No question, but the art is awesome. Just wishlisted.

[u/This-Vast6992 → u/Asleep_University_40]

Thank you so much! We'll be sure to pass your kind comment on to the Art team! I actually hung some of the concept arts on my own walls :p

[u/WrittenAir]

Such an adorable game. Are there any particular strategies used for intertwining gameplay and narrative? What did the process of marrying those two look like?

[u/This-Vast6992 → u/WrittenAir]

I think one core principle here is that, in a game, you have gameplay objectives (what the player needs to accomplish to win) and dramaturgical objectives (what the characters want), and ideally, those two must align so the game feels coherent. On the practical level, it takes many many discussions between GD and ND teams : the GDs will come to us with some constraints / things that absolutely need to be in the flow, and we will think of a way to make it make sense in the universe / character's internal logic. Or we will have an idea for a story that requires a certain gameplay feature, and we will discuss it among each other: is it doable, is it worth the effort, do we have the resources to accomplish it...

[u/This-Vast6992 → u/This-Vast6992]

At some point, I was working on a recipe-based quest, and I really wanted to include some salt. We were near the sea, so it would've made sense for salt to accumulate on the shore with time. The GD team loved the idea of a salt cave so much, it made it to the shipped version even though salt had stopped being an ingredient long ago.

[u/Thomas_Sand_ → u/WrittenAir]

It wasn’t an easy process, especially because metroidvanias are heavily systems-driven by nature. From the very beginning, we wanted to tell a kind of tale, so we had to figure out how to weave that into the non-linearity of the genre.

Some metroidvanias, like the Hollow Knight series, bring a lot of lore and depth to their characters, creating rich, fascinating worlds to explore, full of encounters.

Our goal was different: we wanted to tell a story you follow from beginning to end, built around a clear quest and told in chapters. That meant a lot of work to find the right rhythm between game design and narrative.
To do that, we built systems that track the player’s progression, so we can bring in the story at the right pace. Not necessarily at an exact moment, but once we know the player has overcome certain challenges or gathered certain resources.

The narrative also fed a lot into the game and level design. We built many scenes around a strong narrative idea, then made sure our mechanics supported it. That helped us create memorable moments, especially the ones where you find a new merlie.

[u/Sephardson]

Thanks for doing an AMA today!

What sort of birds inspired the character designs?

What was your approach to designing the map or levels for this game?

[u/This-Vast6992 → u/Sephardson]

Hello! Merlies is a made-up word that sounds a lot like the French word for "blackbird". However, narratively we didn't want to point too strongly to one species of birds over another, which is why, throughout the game, the Merlies refer to their flock by using several different collective nouns for birds. We also invented the collective noun "millinery" for them. It was really fun! :)

[u/Thomas_Sand_ → u/This-Vast6992]

Very deep question ! I would say that the levels were built in several layers, all rooted in the game’s ecological message.

Big part of the narrative was telling the story of the world’s pollution through the level design. It happens progressively: the further you go, the more litter you find.
We also wanted to design the world “from the characters’ point of view”, a world where you feel really small compared to how huge everything is.

From there, we built several biomes that are easy to recognize, each with its own flora, colors and inhabitants.

In each biome, we used landmarks that are also big pieces of trash. They help players build a mental map, and they’re a constant reminder of what humans leave behind. Some of this waste even gets recycled by our merlies.

Finally, we want our wholesomevania to be accessible, so we open up the metroidvania side little by little. The start of the game is more linear, so players can get comfortable with the systems. Then a few key moments really open up the ways you can explore the world. Since the characters’ abilities are all about getting around, the world grows bigger as their movement abilities unlock, so players can always cover more ground without feeling lost.

[u/Wjb1]

Fantastic looking sketches, how many of them did not make it into the game?

[u/No_External_9780 → u/Wjb1]

Actually, quite a lot! Cosmografik filled two or three Moleskine sketchbooks with these characters, so we had tons of options to choose from... which sometimes made the choices really hard!

But having so much material was also a real asset: it helped us understand much more precisely what this universe was and where it was heading. Even the sketches that didn’t make it into the game shaped the world in some way.