Thorvalla - Interview @ Gamers.de

Gamers.de has interviewed Guido Henkel about Thorvalla:

Gamers.de: Let´s move on to "Thorvalla". How´s the production coming along? Did it already start or are you still in the conception/pre-production phase?

Guido Henkel: Currently, “Thorvalla” is in the pre-production phase and will remain there for a while longer. We are creating preliminary art to determine the look and feel of the game. Some of the early sketches we have on the Kickstarter page does not really reflect the look we want to go for in the end. It is hard to put a “look” into words and communicate it to the team, so it is a bit of a trial and error process where you have artists play around with different styles and look at them to see which ones best fit the vision you have in your mind.

During this phase we are also looking at the game mechanics, toying with various ideas that we’ve had how we could handle gameplay. A lot has been made of some of my comments regarding the changes I have in mind, but the truth of the matter is that if the concept I have in mind right now will not work or won’t be fun, we’ll scrap it just as easily. These are things you have to do early on in the life of a project, however, so it is one of the things we need to tackle and decide first. This process also goes hand in hand with the decision which core technology we will be using. I am not much of a 3D fan. While it gives you all the control in the world, I just don’t like the looks of it. Therefore, my initial approach will always be a 2D or 2.5D approach, where you use 3D technology to render sprite art, essentially. That has some serious drawbacks, however, and depending on exactly which game mechanics we will settle on, will not have much of a choice and have to go with a full 3D core approach.

The key to me is - and has always been - that technology is a tool, a vehicle to drive the vision, not the other way around. Overall such a pre-production process does take time and often yields very little to look at. Traditionally this was never a problem because at this stage no one ever knew of the existence of a project outside the developer or publisher, but with Kickstarter people immediately expect results. It’s understandable, of course. they are excited and want to digest as much as they can, but at the same time such results are sometimes hard to produce, particularly so early in the life of a project.