GameBanshee - Ossian Studios Interview

GameBanshee's BuckGB interviewed Ossian Studios to talk about the developers latest RPG The Shadow Sun, and the dropped Scars of Betrayal project.

GB: The overall reception to The Shadow Sun appears to be quite favorable, with a Metacritic score currently hovering at 81 and an iTunes profile page filled with 4- and 5-star reviews. Are you happy with these results, and has it helped pique any publisher interest in future Ossian-developed games?

Alan: We had many of the big mobile publishers contact us back in 2010/2011 about partnering up to do The Shadow Sun. Given our past experience with publishers cancelling our projects, I was rather unenthusiastic at the idea of working with a publisher for TSS. This was our chance to be in complete control of our game. Who knows what the future will bring, but we do enjoy our autonomy as a small indie developer.

GB: As an iOS title first and foremost, The Shadow Sun has clearly been optimized for touch-capable devices. Have you considered porting the game to the PC, and if so, would it require a lot of reworking to the control system to allow a keyboard and mouse to be utilized effectively?

Alan: We’ve had that discussion numerous times here. It’s not so much the control issue to support keyboard, mouse, and gamepad, as those could be addressed. It’s more the case that we designed TSS as a mobile game in 2010 and made certain decisions to suit that, such as a smaller world, shorter dialogue line lengths to fit on the iPhone screen, lower poly characters, and limited VO. So it would take significant work to upgrade the game for the PC, and in the end may not be worth it.

GB: Before working on The Shadow Sun and somewhere between Darkness over Daggerford and Mysteries of Westgate, you also worked on an expansion pack for the original The Witcher called Scars of Betrayal. How did that project come about, exactly? Did CD Projekt RED approach you to develop the add-on?

Alan: Working on The Witcher franchise with CDPR was a great experience - they are such down-to-earth and passionate people. How it came about was that we were demoing Darkness over Daggerford at GDC 2007 because we’d won the Best RPG Mod award for our mod at the IGF, and Marcin Iwiński walked up to me to introduce himself. He said that BioWare had recommended Ossian Studios as a good developer to make post-release content for RPG games. Marcin was interested in creating additional content for The Witcher (a game that wouldn’t be released for another 7 months), in the same way that the Premium Mods were made for NWN. We were excited about the idea and by the end of 2007 we had entered full production for Scars of Betrayal.