Northern Shadow - Interview @ RPS

Rock, Paper, Shotgun interviewed Game Developer Arda Güneş to ask a few question about the just received Sandbox RPG game Northern Shadows.

RPS: Northern Shadow looks positively massive. How big will it be, though? How big of a world are you making? Both above and underground?

Güneş: The world is divided between continental zones. We haven’t made a real life scale comparison, but each zone takes around 10 minutes between the farthest point to traverse by flying at player speed, and up to 20 minutes by running on foot. We are planning to have around 3 overworld zones like this. There is also an Underworld, which is divided into smaller chunks, but its total size is comparable to an overworld zone.

RPS: It’s just you and one other person making the game, right? How do you do that? What is your work process like?

Güneş: I’m the programmer of our team. Taner is the level designer. Assets wise, we create some of the art assets ourselves, but try to handle most of it externally.

RPS: How long have you been at it? I guess for lack of a better way of phrasing it, how is this even possible, especially when there are only two people working on it? Have either of you ever done anything like this before?

Since our switch to Unity3D around Q4 of 2013, we’ve been prototyping with it. Full production started at the beginning of the year.

We’ve been working on different kinds of games for the past 3 years, but had to take breaks from time to time due to personal reasons. Some of the games were similar to this in scope, so we got experience as to what to expect, what would work and what would not.