Aeon of Sands - Interview @IndieRetroNews

Indie Retro News interviewed Aeon of Sands developer Two Bits Kid.

IRN :

How many levels does the Aeon of Sands - The Trail have?

We could answer that with a number, which is higher than 60, but that tells only a misleading (or partial) story. Aeon of Sands is not a game where you face one level after the other in a linear way.

You will see the desert landscape, obscure mazes, from small to large size, fast paced arenas, nested in about 20 sites spread across the world. During one play-through, you see between one third to half of them, based on the choices you take during the extensive choose-your-adventure part.

The reason for that is that we developed a much more bigger game than you can see in one playthrough. So you can play the game only once to create your unique storyline, or repeatedly to discover different sides to it.

We wanted to give the player the opportunity to make real choices and and we wanted these choices to create the explorable paths of the world for him; your story choices create the game areas: it opens some paths and closes some others.

IRN :

How long has the development taken so far?

Starting in 2012, about 2 years of research, planning, story and pipeline (how to get the exact old-school look and feel), followed by 3 years of implementation (code, graphics, gameplay, story, audio), and almost 1 year of beta-testing and polishing.

The development of Aeon in some numbers, (as of the moment of writing):

• more than 300 hours of Skype calls;
• 18,095 emails exchanged between the two developers;
• more than 30 GB worth of production data files
• a story of about 80,000 words;
• more than 240 illustrations / artworks that go with them;
• more than 60 mazes to explore;
• almost 60 individual opponents, monsters and bosses, for a total 572 frames of animation;
• more than 200 individual items with in-game description;
• more than 270 individual sounds, for monsters, items, ambient and GUI;
• more than a dozen ambient music tracks;
• one developed custom dialogue/story scripting language
• 2,800 coffees or 35 kg of coffee beans ;)

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