The Life and Suffering of Prince Jerian — Development Secrets

We recently announced the new title in The Life and Suffering universe — The Life and Suffering of Prince Jerian. The other day, its developers also held a Q&A session with players, where they answered questions regarding the second installment's development. We have collected them within this article and would like to share the resulting interview with you! The questions were answered by: Theodore — Studio Founder, Chip — Lead Game Designer, and Maxim — Editor-in-Chief.

Theodore: Maxim, you delve deeper into the text than anyone else: you feel, perceive, and edit, polishing it up to perfection. So, I'd like to ask: when compared to part one, has anything changed in the way we write, what intonations we convey, how deeply we immerse ourselves into the hero's journey? Did you catch much change in all these aspects?

Maxim: Theodore and Chip are less familiar with the game than I am because they dwell in higher domains, while I work directly with the embodiment of the text, so it's what I know best. We had an ambitious task to make the text complex compared to part one. This is a dangerous path, since rising complexity reduces accessibility. That's something we can't sacrifice, but we still sought creative growth in terms of maturity. We want to ask more mature questions, make the text less adolescent, but rich and manifold, with greater emphasis on halftones and psychologism. It's clear that we can't play around too much, as we'd like to sell over 1,000 copies and not make a niche product. The project needs to remain accessible, so we set a task for ourselves, among other things, to implement literary embellishments and work with halftones in dialogues, highlighting the psychology behind various in-game situations. I hope that this ambition works out. Guess we'll find out upon reading the reviews.

Players: The second game will follow Prince Jerian. Can you tell us why him? Why was he chosen to be the protagonist, and why did you decide to look at the game's world through the eyes of the crown heir of the Empire? What was your personal interest with this decision and, perhaps, the interest of the game design studio as a whole?

Theodore: Actually, it's important to me that we look for new heroes. I spoke about this before, so it's a hackneyed phrase... But what is a new hero? A new hero is a character that finds themselves under new circumstances and engaged in new activities. That is, playing an unexplored role and providing an angle from which we had never glimpsed the situation in the Blessed Arknian Empire before. I looked for a character who was far removed from Sir Brante's social status and immersed in another sort of life altogether. Someone who'd experience the same era and universe in an entirely different manner. Someone who'd see the big picture hitherto witnessed by Sir Brante from the other side. Therefore, we decided to make the big leap to the opposite end of the social ladder. This allowed us to explore a truly alien world — one made up of Arknians and their politics, where the protagonist would have to solve uniquely different problems and overcome obstacles that Sir Brante would hardly know, seldom see, and perhaps never even think about. The chance to draw such a picture, to see the events unfold like this in our game, pretty much forced us to find this character. It was important that we'd avoid retreading old ground as much as possible, so we had to make a sharp turn towards