Aaru’s Awakening Interview

Conducted By – Adam Ames

Johann Ingi from Lumenox Games breaks down their upcoming hand-drawn Indie 2D action platformer, Aaru’s Awakening.

Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your role with the development of Aaru’s Awakening.

Lumenox Games is a team of 8 individuals – programmers and artists.  Our game, Aaru’s Awakening, is drawn completely by hand and therefore our artists play a very big role in the game. The headquarters are in Iceland but as some of us live abroad. We are an indie game developer and aim to stay indie and create the games we want to, the way we want to.

 

How did you get started in developing PC games?

The team came from different directions, programming side of the team was and still is enrolled in the University of Reykjavík, while the art team had recently graduated. It was a weird sAaru’s Awakenings of events that lead the team together. For almost all of us this is the first proper title we are working on.

 

Where did the idea for Aaru’s Awakening come from?

Aaru’s Awakening was originally called Relocator, two of the founders planned to make a small game that would take a few weeks to develop as a lean startup for a game development team. The idea came from translocator, a weapon in Unreal tournament that would teleport the player to the place where you shot. This is the premise for the teleportation function of Aaru.

The relocator project got iterated further and won the Icelandic Game Creator competition, which made us enough cash to create Lumenox Games. Once the company had been formed and the core team had been established the development of the Lumenox world began and Aaru was born.

 

What are some of the successes and failures you learned from in developing Aaru’s Awakening?

We feel like our gameplay development is one of our successes. We’ve used an iterative prototyping process, where every level is designed as an interactive wireframe that has no restrictions before the art is made for the level. Each level is then again iterated upon until we feel the level is exceptional and unique.

 

In its current form, how close is Aaru’s Awakening to your initial vision?

Aaru’s Awakening’s existence and vision didn’t become a reality from something that we had in mind. We made a prototype with the teleportation mechanics and we played around with the prototype in our game engine until we hit a playstyle that felt good and kept on experimenting towards the current game. Like some game designers say, everything within the design exists already – you just have to find it. We searched for it and found Aaru’s Awakening.

Some devs admitted their games were too hard upon release because they became experts as they developed the game.  Talk about setting the difficulty levels for Aaru’s Awakening and if you faced a similar challenge.

That is indeed a big issue for us at Lumenox. We feel like the true game is unlocked at the higher difficulty levels and we really want to bring players to that stage as fast as possible. Setting the difficulty curve right has required extensive playtesting because everyone in the team has become “difficulty level blind”.

 

Please talk about developing the art style, level design and music for Aaru’s Awakening.

The visuals of a indie game are very important – they are what initially grabs the attention of a player. Right from the start we were aiming for an art style that would make us stand out, but also be possible on a shoestring budget with 2-3 people. The inspiration for the art comes from 70’s animation films. Although we have moved away from this concept – it is where the original idea comes from. Hence it was a natural progression for us to start testing out what a game would look like if it were done in a traditional way – meaning everything done by hand, not digitally.

After the initial tests we quickly realized that watercoloring everything was simply madness, it did however look really good and would have been awesome to do if we had an art team of 30 people – but for us it was impossible. We then moved on in figuring out how best to emulate our initial tests, with production and speed in mind. The outcome is the style you see today.  The same goes for the music, we started out with 70’s proggressive rock but as time passed, the style changed and developed. As we learned how the game would look like we realized the mood we wanted to create with music and sounds.

We have approached the level design from two angles. One is that we want the game to be hard! It should always be little bit harder than the player is comfortable with. Reason for this is that we want the progression to be within the player and not in some form of XP levels. And as with everything in life, a person does not become better at something unless the boundaries of that person are pushed.  At the same time we want the game to be fun – not a ‘rage game’. This is one of the reasons why the Alpha demo was a good thing for us. We saw that the progression was way way too steep. So we immediately started working on a learning curve in order to not make the game frustrating.

It’s a delicate balance of making the challenges fun when playing them, but still hard to complete. As you progress through the game you have harder challenges but more fun completing them because of you’ve become a better player.

 

How did you go about funding Aaru’s Awakening and did you receive financial or emotional support from friends and family?

We have received a couple grants and gotten assistance from the Icelandic state, a big part of the project has been funded by the founders of the company.  With regards to emotional support, I think people around us have in general been quite supportive and impressed that we are actually doing this.

 

Can you tell us why you chose to release a demo for Aaru’s Awakening?

To be honest it may have been a mistake to release a demo of such an early alpha gameplay, but our initial thought was that players would become more involved by interacting with the game and Aaru’s Awakening being our debut game. We wanted to show the world we created, that we had something working in real-time and that this is something that is going to be finished. We wanted to get people excited about how far we had reached already in only 3 months of development.  The release also gave us valuable information. This is our first project and we felt it was important to get feedback on the Alpha build to understand what we were doing right and what we should do better.

 

What are your thoughts on how the PC gaming industry as a whole are dealing with the problem of intrusive DRM and piracy?

We feel like piracy is a big issue for online products. DRM however is definitely not the way to go, having the pirates offer better services than us only increases piracy. The way Netflix, Spotify and Playstation Plus are dealing with piracy is clearly the way to go, we think offering better services and more value to the user than pirates do, then the customer will gladly offer you his money. In the end we want the consumer to benefit the most from us.

 

How do you feel about the recent trend of YouTube personalities monetizing Aaru’s Awakening?

We think it’s a positive relationship, the individuals gain money and we gain exposure. It’s also very positive for us in the team and it brings forth a game developer’s best emotion – the one you get when you see a person enjoying what you’ve put so much passion in to creating.

 

How do you feel about DLC and its current implementation in the PC gaming industry?

DLC is a positive feature but just like free-to-play it’s easy to mess up. DLC allows developers to keep on creating content for a longer duration after a game’s initial release. If it’s used for that purpose instead of trying to dig harder into the customer’s wallet, DLC is plain awesome and makes everyone happier.

 

How do you feel about the online modding community in general and specifically if mods were created for Aaru’s Awakening?

Mixed feelings on that one. It would of course be great if people enjoyed the Aaru’s Awakening that much that they spent their spare time on modding and making additions to the game that they felt are needed.  However we’d rather like to see people create something of their own, using Aaru’s Awakening (or other games) as an inspiration and taking the whole concept to a completely different level. So instead of being boxed in our vision they could create their own vision in their own game.

 

What advice would you give up-and-coming indie PC developers who are trying to break into the business?

Make sure the project you are working on is something you think is awesome and that you enjoy spending time on the project. Indie developers should focus on making the best game they can.  Perhaps the reason so few people actually do this is because it’s hard as hell and you need to have a lot of love for your project if you want it to become something other than a dream. -End

 

We would like to thank everyone at Lumenox Games and wish them all of the best for thier upcoming release.  You can learn more on the official site, Facebook and Steam Greenlight.