The Artful Escape is about finding a "stage persona"

One of the bigger indie titles of this year's E3, largely thanks to its prominent display during the Xbox E3 briefing, was without a doubt Beethoven & Dinosaur's The Artful Escape. We caught up with programmer Sean Slevin to learn more.

"It was a very abstract trailer", says Slevin. "It's basically a platformer. It's an adventure platformer, it's kind of cinematic. And the general idea is that it's about this young musician who goes on this spiritual journey to find his stage persona. It's about the characters that musicians create for themselves, kind of like Ziggy Stardust or the costumes and helmets of Daft Punk. These characters that they create that they tell their music through and you're this young musician and you don't really know you are as a musician, people in your town have these expectations, and you kind of end up through certain circumstances getting pulled through these multiple dimensions going on this crazy journey to figure out who you are."

The conversation also covered things like the original Kickstarter and the mechanics. The game recently found a publisher (Annapurna Interactive, who also published What Remains of Edith Finch), and it is really only with this support that the project has really begun to take shape.

"They've helped us get the game to where it is right now and behind the scenes we've basically been cleaning up a lot of the concepts that we had earlier on and try and focus the vision for the game. And that's kind of where we're at now. Now we're actually starting development proper where [we're] actually building all the worlds and characters and the levels and things like that."

The game still has "a while" to go in development, and will eventually launch first on Xbox One and Windows 10.