Interview: A Coffee Break with Aeon of Sands - The Trail

A Coffee Break with: Aeon of Sands - The Trail The Gazette of Independent Gaming did an in-depth interview about the development and design choices with TwoBitsKid, read it here: https://medium.com/@gofig.news/a-coffee-break-with-florian-aeon-of-sands-the-trail-5410422ac0d8

What impresses me with Aeon of Sands, is the amount of choices you’ve left up for the player to take, giving the game a feel that’s almost “Choose your own Adventure”-like. It’s especially impressive because there’s only the two of you, and you really didn’t go the easy road. So, why was it so important for you to give player narrative choices?

Yes, to create, implement, test and revise the branching nature of Aeon of Sands’ narrative is one of the most difficult things in development, but we felt that it was necessary to be very specific with this story, to avoid it being only a blurred background. And this specificity meant for us that the choices needed to have different and tangible consequences, plus an amount of text that is novel-sized. But that’s the point: any game is a story. Such mechanics are something we as players care for, even subconsciously; thus, we should care for it even more as developers. In this case, the game is a story we tell. We wanted to tell it the best we could, so, this was the choice we made. And if it required complexity, we would have gone for it, as we have. ...