Check out our first-look and developer interview of Aaru’s Awakening, all the way from Iceland

You may have noticed over the last half-decade or so, that I’m a big nerd. I like my videogames, what can I say? I’m always on the lookout for the next best gaming experience, and I’m not shy about trying out every genre, any time, anywhere. Seriously. Give me the games. I will play them and love them. Especially the quirky, interesting games it doesn’t seem like many people will pay attention to.

The latest one of these games that falls under my weird categorical filing, is Aaru’s Awakening. It’s being created by Lumenox games, and after watching a couple trailers, somehow Johann Guojonsson and I met up over e-mail. It was fortuitous timing, as their new trailer drops today, and so does the demo of the game on Steam’s Green Light. Check out our interview and the game below.

You’ve contacted Sony and Microsoft, but do you think you’ll even need to with their self publishing?Jason Nawara
Our connections with Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft haven’t indicated that we can just publish with out any permission. I think contracts will have to be signed and such. Also we want to make the game available on PS3 and 360 for those who can’t or won’t buy the new consoles right away.Jóhann Guðjónsson
How many frames of animation do you believe are in the game?Jason Nawara
Regarding the frames, the art team and programmers weren’t sure – too many to count. They said Aaru – the protagonist – was 130 frames by himself, and then we have heaps of other characters as well as all the effects in the game are frame by frame.Jóhann Guðjónsson
Is Iceland as nice as it seems?Jason Nawara
Iceland is cool, for sure. The weather might be harsh sometimes but the landscape is beautiful and has a certain small country charm. The government here also supports us to a certain extent. I bet the country is much more fun for tourists though than locals.Jóhann Guðjónsson
Do you find the climate in 2013 easier or more difficult to build a game like the one you’re making? Now you have Green Light, and more…Jason Nawara
This is actually the first game for all of us, so we really can’t compare to how it was before. We however feel that the console giants are showing indie games immense interest, and we got much attention from them during PAX Prime. Also we’re able to create the game with Unity 3D which makes everything so much easier for us. Creating a custom game engine would have made things much more difficult, for sure.

Steam Greenlight is hard to answer as well. We feel that we have more than an adequate game to get the Greenlight and we’re even a bit confident that we’ll release it on the big three consoles – but we’ve been on Greenlight for more than a year with out getting noticed by Valve. We even tried opening a new page hoping to catch the eye of more people, as we had released a bunch of new media since the initial launch. So really we just have to keep on working on our game and hope that attention catches on, people will share it with each other, web media will feature it and eventually we get enough votes. Obviously if you get on Steam it makes things great for indie developers and it’s probably the best platform for indie games today.Jóhann Guðjónsson

It seems like the game is a platformer at heart, am I correct? Are you thinking about adding controller support?Jason Nawara
Correct, and yes. As we’re aiming to release on the consoles we’re going to have controller support for the PC too.Jóhann Guðjónsson

Now, Lumenox is finally releasing the long-awaited demo for Aaru’s Awakening on Steam’s Greenlight. I’m here to tell you that it’s pretty friggin’ awesome. Below is the new trailer and a link to the demo so you can check it out.

If you like what you see, throw some comments out and I’m sure the Lumenox guys will be glad to answer them!

Published on October 30, 2013 at 5:01 pm
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