![]() How challenging was it to create the right mix of play styles between the three and then make it all fit in the game design? Strangely enough, I didn’t really play many of the room-by-room games like “Legacy of the Wizard” or “Tower of Druaga”, but maybe I saw some video or something at some point that inspired that concept within Astalon!Ĭould you tell us a little about the three main characters. “Lickle” (“Little Samson” in the US) really kicked up the NES’ graphical potential to maybe the highest point seen in a platformer! I made the animations in Astalon as fluid as I could because I wanted to make graphics similar to Lickle. The main ones (Castlevania, Megaman, Zelda) have really influenced my whole video game development career, but Astalon is more directly influenced by lesser-known gems! Stuff like “Faxanadu” was a huge influence, as being a super-early Metroidvania style game. The game takes a lot of inspiration from the NES era of gaming, tell us about some of your favourite games from that time, and which of these directly influenced Astalon: Tears of the Earth whether in gameplay or visual design? Despite the high-energy music and the fact that you have to fight lots of different monsters and that there are traps at every corner, it really is kind of relaxing to explore the tower and find shortcuts/items/secrets. Also, Jon says it best when he says that the exploration in Astalon is very chill. It is an explorative adventure game, influenced by all the well-known greats (as well as not well-known greats), but it really doesn’t feel much like any of its inspirations. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but we focused on a more hand-designed style of game. Maybe sometime after launch I’ll do an article where I show all the prototypes, that could be interesting to some people I think.įor readers who are curious about Astalon: Tears of the Earth, what’s the best way to describe its fusion of different gameplay styles?įirst off, it is NOT a rogue-like or rogue-lite :). The third prototype was basically the same game as what you see now, but being made in a different development language/software. Starting from the 2nd prototype, 3 characters were introduced. At first there was only one playable character. With each iteration and restart, more stuff was introduced that brought the game closer to it’s current form! The first prototype had room-by-room exploration, and that stuck all the way through. When you first conceptualised Astalon: Tears of the Earth as a video game, how much of the original vision and concept was retained in the final game that will be launching soon? His art style really became refined in that era, but it’s really hard to find and unfortunately, never was translated into English… His 2nd big comic series “Darkhair Captured” is one of my favorites. Ryusuke is one of my favorite artists, and one of the main reasons I started to take drawing seriously in the first place! Several years ago, I got in touch with him just to see if on the off-chance he was available to help out, and thankfully, he was! Astalon was in the middle of it’s 2nd prototype then, and he had worked on the 3 main characters, even that early in Astalon’s lifetime! Since then we’ve met a few times, and I’m hoping to keep collaborating with him. How did the involvement of Ryusuke Mita come about? ![]() I had met Nayan from Dangen once in Osaka, and him and the rest of the team were very interested in all the things that LABS was working on, so it was pretty natural to strike a deal with them!Ĭan you tell us a little bit about your previous work in the video game industry before creating Astalon: Tears of the Earth? There is a lot to talk about, especially when you want your game to be ported and localized to as many platforms as is viable, so we just looked for the best accommodation for what we were trying to do, and ended up in the nest of Dangen Entertainment. Then THAT got roadblocked, so with the help of a programmer, Jon LePage, on the 4th iteration of the game, I was finally able to complete my work!įinding the right publisher was a bit tough – we were in touch with a small handful of publishers at first. And that didn’t fly either, so I restarted it again. I’m bad with dates, but I think I probably started prototyping Astalon at the end of 2016. I thought of a universe that was kind of a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting, where the kingdoms of the past were destroyed and buried under a nuclear desert. Thank you! So basically, some time after my previous game (Castle In The Darkness) was released in 2015, I wanted to make something new and more original. Can you give us a brief development history behind the game, and also share the process of finding the right publisher? Congratulations on the upcoming launch of Astalon: Tears of the Earth.
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