Aragami is coming to Nintendo Switch so we thought the time was right to interview the people behind it.
As always, our first question for our guests is to introduce themselves. Can you tell a bit more about yourself and the company you work for?
Hi there! I’m David Leon, the studio director at Lince Works, a Barcelona based indie dev which was established in 2014. In October 2016 we released our first game, Aragami with quite a bit of success. We started off as a team of 10 plus some outsourced help and today we’re 13 full-time devs with quite a few projects and ideas swirling around in our heads.
Since this interview will focus on Aragami, can you tell us a bit more about the game?
Our go to response is that Aragami is an action stealth game in which you play as an undead assassin with the power to control the shadows. We have since released on PC, Mac, Linux, PS4 and XB1 with a base game + a story expansion.
Our game was inspired mainly by our love of old-school stealth games from our teenage years. Tenchu, Thief, the first Metal Gear Solids etc. Those games did stealth in a way that we felt has been sadly missing in the last few years. Many modern stealth games make you overpowered with little consequence of you being detected and attacked. We wanted to bring back the tension of being spotted, the consequence of fighting head-on and the suspense of needing to plan and outsmart your enemies. Couple that with some cool powers, a colorful cel-shaded style, a feudal Japanese setting, and you have Aragami in a nutshell.
Fun Fact. Initially the game was just a student project we made to submit for our disterations, but after graduation, we thought we may have something worth releasing here, so we formed our team and took a swing at “ indie dev life”.
The game has just been announced for a Nintendo Switch release, was this something you were planning from the start? How happy are you to see your game releasing on Nintendo’s newest?
It has always been a hope of ours to release on Switch, but the logistics always meant we had to push the idea for a later time and date. So many fans have been asking us when we are coming to Switch, so we’re extremely happy to finally be able to do so. And of course, no longer having to answer that question with a generic “We’re looking into it.”
Since it’s outsourced to a publisher, I’m thinking you won’t be handling the port yourselves? How is it to ‘leave’ your baby in the hands of Merge Games?
Yes, Merge games offered to source and deliver a company who will port the game for us so that was a major benefit to us. We’re still a small team and porting isn’t just a matter of copy-pasting code. Stage Clear Studios, the studio working on the port along us, is also based in Spain. That means that we’re able to communicate with them easily and we have a lot of faith in their abilities based on what they’ve shown us so far.
The game is coming both as a digital and physical release, can we expect some cool extras like artbooks/steel cases for the physical release or is this something you’re still looking into?
Sadly, that’s not for me to divulge. Merge Games will have to decide and then they’ll announce the details.
Now that Aragami is available on all major platforms, what’s next for the company? Can you give us a small tease of what’s yet to come?
Oh man! We have so many ideas and projects we’re testing out! Some are totally new and outside of what we did up till now. We’re also looking at some VR stuff while also tinkering at where we can go next with the Aragami foundations. Since the original game gave us a bit of breathing room, we’re able to actually spend a bit of time and resources trying out new things instead of rushing onto the next project. Merge Games taking the Switch port from us also helped in this situation so we can solely focus on our next big ideas. That’s really all I can reveal for now.
And our last question, which game are you currently playing now and on what console?
Just finished God of War on PS4… such an amazing experience! Can’t wait to get my hands on Spiderman next.
