Farflame spotted an Ash of Gods interview at Neocrisis:

Ash of Gods Interview

We had the chance to get a few questions answered for Ash of Gods out on PC. They were answered by Nikolay Bondarenko, AurumDust's CEO.

What inspired you to make this game?

This is a combination of things. Back In 2007, I had the opportunity to make my own game when I worked in TVX. The idea was to combine card and turn-based gameplay, and the story and meta-gameplay was built around the control of special structures - ziggurats. The financial crisis of 2008 buried that project, but not the idea.

A few years later, the books of Sergey Malitsky helped me to rethink the presentation of such a story. And The Banner Saga in 2013 showed that you can present a complex and long story in my favorite 2D format, a sort of way to rethink the format of the classical Japanese visual novella in the Western manner.

While developing the game, what was the hardest issue(s) that you came across?

The most difficult thing was to find the right people and teach them how to work together. We had to find ways to integrate our workflows, and work as a team, optimizing what we were doing at every opportunity. For example, in Ash of Gods, the first scenes we created took about three to three-and-a-half weeks to draft and complete, while at the end as we got closer to finishing the game, work on such a scene only took three to four days.

The second challenge was balancing the combat system, AI, and dynamic complexity settings. I'm still not sure that we have solved this problem correctly, but it seems to be working well!

The third challenge was dealing with the monstrous complexity of reducing the branches of the plot. Our game is focused on the decisions a player makes, and so there is an incredible number of story branches. We drew branch schemes of varying degrees of detail, prototyped and wrote these branches in Articy Draft (a development tool), and still, over and over again, the QA team started the day with the words, "But if a certain character dies here, then everything breaks”.

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