Operencia: The Stolen Sun - Interview @Gamingbolt

Gamingbolt has an interview about Operencia: The Stolen Sun.

How much do the maps in the game vary from each other? Are the variations from a visuals perspective, or do they vary in terms of design and mechanics as well?

We have more than ten different visual settings in Operencia and most maps highly differ from each other in their mechanics as well. Our main level design principle was to make the maps diverse and deliver as many “wow moments” as possible.

There are some dark dungeons with narrow corridors and some with huge, open spaces and the layout always defines the puzzles and the behaviour of the enemies. Let me give you some examples. Many towers have multi-level puzzles which mean the targets are linked somehow and you have to comprehend the connection between them.

Then you have to climb to the magical World Tree where you will walk on the trunk, use the branches to build new routes and even move into the tree’s interior lairs and get out on the other side.

Last but not least, some rooms of Anna’s castle are flooded so you are not allowed to spend too much time underwater in search for treasures or you are going to drown. Every level needs a different approach on how to progress.

How much is Operencia going to be focused on narrative and storytelling?

The overall vision for Operencia was to modernize the classic first-person dungeon-crawling RPG – and a huge part of that is telling an interesting story with memorable characters. As much as we all loved playing Wizardry in the ‘80s, it wasn’t exactly deep in those aspects. But Operencia, I would say, takes more inspiration from Final Fantasy games in this regard. We do have an overall storyline running through the entire game, which you find out fairly early on involves literally finding the sun, which has vanished from the sky – hence the game’s subtitle. Once again, Central European mythology comes into play, as Hungarians once believed there was an actual Sun King whom we can see in the sky during daylight. He’s very real in our universe – and he’s been kidnapped.

And like Final Fantasy games ever since the Super NES era, the path to finding him involves encountering a whole party’s worth of diverse characters – a ragtag bunch that somehow has come together to become the land of Operencia’s only hope. It’s my sincere hope that you walk away from Operencia remembering characters like Jóska, Kela, and Sebastian in a similar regard to the likes of Cloud, Tidus, and Locke.

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Thanks Farflame!