From The Rogue Prince of Persia to MyDear.exe: Falling Leaves Studio Goes Small

Exhaustion, Risk, and Rediscovering the Pleasure of Making Games

Lucie Dewagnier and Jolan Reynaud discuss leaving larger productions behind, building Falling Leaves Studio, early playtesting, and the personal story behind MyDear.exe.

Lucie Dewagnier and Jolan Reynaud worked on The Rogue Prince of Persia at Evil Empire. After years on larger productions, they left to build Falling Leaves Studio around much smaller games.

Their first project, MyDear.exe, is a short narrative game set inside an old PC, following Ellie through a game made for her by Lucien after 57 years together. Steam lists a planned 2026 release, with a demo available now.

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Developer interviews at Fix Gaming Channel focus on the people behind the projects: what changed, what went wrong, what they learned, and why they chose to make the games they are making now.

Leaving Big Productions Behind

Fix Gaming Channel spoke with Dewagnier and Reynaud about why they formed Falling Leaves Studio, what changed after The Rogue Prince of Persia, the realities of running a two-person studio, and what they hope players take away from MyDear.exe. Their answers below are presented verbatim.

1. You both came from working on The Rogue Prince of Persia. What made you decide that the next step should be leaving larger productions behind and starting Falling Leaves Studio?

Both: It’s quite simple to be honest. We were pretty exhausted after The Rogue. It was a wonderful experience but 4 years is pretty long.

Both: Refocusing on smaller projects was a way for us to find back the pleasure of making games, the thing that made us come into the industry in the first place.

Lucie: As a small and young studio, it was also driven by a risk management strategy.

Lucie: We knew we wouldn’t have the cash to make big projects on several years, so we instead wanted to “throw the dice as many times as we could and hope for a 6”, not putting all our eggs in the same basket.

Lucie: That allows us to reduce the investment risk.

Jolan: Lastly, we also identified that there is quite the place growing for small games and experience. In the current economy, people have less and less time and money.

Jolan: We believe games, and art/culture in a whole, should be accessible to everyone. Keeping our production small allows us to reduce the price under the 10€/$/£, it’s very important for us.

2. Your Steam page says you wanted to stop working on “big and long games for years.” Was there a particular moment when you both realized that was no longer how you wanted to make games?

Lucie: I was always more attracted by small indie games myself, developping tones of little games and prototypes on my free time. Games that I never published. I guess it was time for it hehe.

Jolan: Yeah, like our audience, we are getting a bit older too, and big games don’t always make sense. We have less and less time to play ourselves. Making games that we could play ourselves is pretty satisfying.

3. Of all the games you could have made as your first independent project, why was MyDear.exe the one you wanted to make?

Lucie: It had a great balance between feasability and challenge for us as devs.

Jolan: For sure! Personnaly, I was a Producer for about 10 years before starting Falling Leaves. Of course I was pretty close from the team and in the creative process, but I never had to create myself.

Jolan: Jumping to the Art and Narrative position was a big leap of faith for me. Fortunately enough, I was, and still am, surrounded by awesome people helping me grow. 😀

Both: For our first project, it was also very important for us to make something personal. Something that “only us” could make.

Both: This project takes inspiration from our own family and friends. It’s a part of us in a way. And a love letter to them.

4. MyDear.exe is built around Ellie and Lucien celebrating 57 years together. Where did that idea come from, and how personal is the story to the two of you?

Both: The whole idea started by Clémentine, our programmer friend and freelance. During spring 2025 she was tinkering with an asset pack on godot and developed a small prototype of a game that would take place in a computer.

Both: We liked it and proposed her to make it more than just a prototype. From there, we discussed what it could be, especially on the narrative side to help us shape the complete game.

Jolan: I tried several ideas for the story that were more like CSI or kinda horror or big corpo stuff. The depressing stuff.

Both: We then discussed it and quickly the conclusion appeared: current society is depressing enough, we don’t need to add more!

Both: Plus, almost all the other Fake OS games use that kind of narrative setup (CSI / Horror / Detective…). We like it but didn’t see the point into making another one.

Lucie: From there we decided we would make something cozy and cute. A few more iterations on the story and we arrived to what we have now!

5. Going from a project like The Rogue Prince of Persia to a roughly two-hour game must change almost everything about development. What has been the biggest adjustment?

Lucie: On my side, I think the biggest adjustment was to think of simpler gameplay. Simpler and smaller features allowed us to iterate quickly.

Lucie: We were also able to come up with more “experimental” features. Things that would make sense on a 2 hour playthrough, but wouldn’t hold on a larger scale.

Jolan: One other point was to correctly evaluate the time between tools and just make it by hand. Making a tool for a feature that’s used only once doesn’t really make sense.

6. Has your experience working on The Rogue Prince of Persia influenced MyDear.exe in ways players might not immediately notice?

Jolan: One thing we noticed from the development of The Rogue is that we started playtesting very late in the production cycle. It was more complicated with all the NDA and all, but still we were too shy.

Lucie: I have a saying about that: “If you’re not ashamed of playtesting your game publicly, it means you’re too late”. Organize playtest as soon as you can! The feedbacks you get from players are raw diamonds that you can refine, and the sooner the better.

7. Falling Leaves Studio talks about making short experiences that can be enjoyed with a hot drink on a rainy afternoon. Is that a philosophy you intend to keep for future games, or could the studio eventually make something larger?

Both: We think about it, regularly, as a matter of fact. Before we started the studio we already started working on side projects that we eventually left on the side after shortening the content several times.

For now, we are focused on small experience, that’s part of our philosophy and creative direction. We think it’s very important to have a editorial line to follow as a studio, while not being stubborn if we can’t make it live.

So, as of today, no, no bigger games. The thing that we will drop for the next one though, is the hot cocoa. Sliding from the warmth of the cozyness towards something with a more “gloomy” atmosphere.

8. Being a team of two means you don’t have layers of departments between an idea and the finished game. Has that freedom been refreshing, frightening, or a bit of both?

Jolan: Very refreshing for sure hahaha! And of course a bit frightening at times, but more because we are the boss now. We can’t just flip the table and say it’s our boss’ falt hahaha.

9. What have you learned about running your own studio that you never had to think about while working inside a larger development team?

Lucie: The main topic, I think, was that we had to make the marketing ourselves. That’s something we had the chance in the past to either had a publisher our a marketing team working with us.

I really wanted to communicate about the studio itself and not just our games, to grow our community. but it ended up way more time consuming that I would have expected, and I had to make choices in the end.

10. MyDear.exe now has its release approaching. What do you hope players feel when they close that old virtual PC after finishing Ellie and Lucien’s story?

Jolan: Well… hard not to spoil here hehe. It seems like players will need some tissue even though I didn’t intend it like that in the first place.

After the tears have passed, I would love players to feel like Lucien: Happy and lucky for the life (experience) he was able to share with Ellie, and not carrying any regrets.

My own grand-father told me one day that the most important thing for him is to live without regrets. That’s very complicated to see on a day to day basis and you often have regrets for things you missed days, weeks, months or even years after they happened. And I think it’s important for people to be at peace with that. You probably can’t do anything about it now so why dwelling on it.

Instead, focus on what you can do right now. Enjoy the moment, not how it could have been or even how it could be.

There is also a song from The Submarines, called 1940, that talks about that in a simple but striking way: “Something’s wrong when you regret things that haven’t happened yet.”.

And yeah, I know… it’s way easier to say it than actually do it hahaha.

11. Finally, if MyDear.exe succeeds in the way you personally want it to, what would “success” mean for Falling Leaves Studio?

Both: A commercial success would be great for sure! We already started working on our second game and having a commercial success know would help us bring it to the end and secure budget to grow the team a bit.

Especially on the art and marketing side.

But for MyDear.exe we are mostly hoping for a critical success.

We are both very prone to second guessing and impostor syndrome.

So, having our game loved by players (which is already the case with the demo!) would mean the world to us!

For more conversations about development, production, and the people behind games, visit our Game Developer Interviews section.

MyDear.exe

Release: Planned for 2026

Genre: Casual, Indie

Developer / Publisher: Falling Leaves Studio, ClemiSoft / Falling Leaves Studio

Platforms: Windows and macOS — Steam

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