That way you can move much faster and more spontaneously. To make this playable, we abolished the smooth movement introduced in 3D. We wanted a dynamic game that emphasized the nature of the world and the setting. But we didn’t want to make a sluggish game. Grid-based and real-time are often two incompatible games’ types. When you designed combats mechanics, what did you have in mind, and what did you want to avoid? I love how you mixed positioning with real-time, with skills having n cells range, making it very tactical. And if it required complexity, we would have gone for it, as we have. We wanted to tell it the best we could, so, this was the choice we made. In this case, the game is a story we tell. Such mechanics are something we as players care for, even subconsciously thus, we should care for it even more as developers. And this specificity meant for us that the choices needed to have different and tangible consequences, plus an amount of text that is novel-sized.īut that’s the point: any game is a story. Yes, to create, implement, test and revise the branching nature of Aeon of Sands’ narrative is one of the most difficult things in development, but we felt that it was necessary to be very specific with this story, to avoid it being only a blurred background. So, why was it so important for you to give player narrative choices? It’s especially impressive because there’s only the two of you, and you really didn’t go the easy road. What impresses me with Aeon of Sands, is the amount of choices you’ve left up for the player to take, giving the game a feel that’s almost “Choose your own Adventure”-like.
We had the chance to ask Florian some questions, and here’s what he had to say: Now all good things take time : it took our two-men’s crew 6.5 years of their life to make Aeon of Sands, a game that’s not only a love letter to the crawlers of yore, but a unique potluck of many inspirations, from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to the post-apocalypse genre, with some Lawrence of Arabia ’s zest thrown in.
A recipe made in a dungeon crawler’s heaven, I told you! One was working on a 2.5d engine, the other on a user interface and character portraits, and both shared the same passion: retro, first-person perspective crawlers, think Eye of the Beholder and Perihelion. The recipe is simple, but it takes a rare chemistry a nd two matching ingredients: Florian, a software developer living in Germany, and Marco, an illustrator and artist from Italy, meeting each other on the Legend of Grimrock ’s website. Yet, that’s the real lore behind the game Aeon of Sands, the first released game from Two Bits Kid. How often does an exchange on a game’s forum evolve, not only in a sincere friendship, but also in a fully developed, commercialized game? Not often, I bet.
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