WP: Was there anything from that period of time that stood out in particular when designing the game?
KC: There's plenty of very "interesting" historical anecdotes that depict what people were able to do to survive or by greed (often at the expense of the lives of others), we took all those little things and tried to put these somewhere in our story.
WP: History provides developers with an excellent foundation to build a game around. Why did you choose the historical path instead of building a world from scratch?
KC: As I was saying at the beginning, the game is a tale, and like folktales we are inspired by the real world but distort it to serve a story. Our goal is to obtain something that sounds "true". It's a strong guideline for our story, character, gameplay, setting and it was easier for us to obtain that using History instead of a fully fictitious world. And, to us, it looked far more engaging to live something that might be true to reality.
WP: It feels like the game is centred around an emotive narrative experience. How challenging was it to write a story that would hit players right in the feels yet still be an enjoyable video game?
KC: Super hard! When we started to develop the game we didn't have any visuals, few animations, generated voices (robot voices!) and no music. In this context it's extremely hard to figure out if what you are building is going to be credible and will create a strong narration with authentic emotions for the player. All those elements arrive very late in a production of our size so you must do many "leaps of faith" and hope that the final scene is going to reach the goal. Our story is about young kids and it must feel as natural as possible. We've failed many times before finding the right tone and mood that sounds true. Fortunately, we cast child actors for Amicia and Hugo, and they helped us in building authentic emotions. They were really involved in the game's creation and made us interesting proposals to make the dialogues evolve into sounding more spontaneous.
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