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We spoke with Violeta Casado, co-founder and artist at Noxfall Studios, about their game Nordic Ashes: Survivors of Ragnarok.
"All right, I'm in Barcelona for the Indie Dev Day 2024 and I'm here joined by Violeta, thank you so much for joining us. I'm taking a look at a really beautiful game which is called Nordic Ashes, everybody's talking about this, did you know that? Really? I didn't, well it's been a game that many people have already reviewed, so I'm really happy to be here in this convention in Barcelona."
"And you play a part in this game looking great? Yes, we are a three people studio, a three team, so I do all the art part and my two colleagues are programmers, so we are a very small team but we manage to do everything by ourselves. Tell me a bit about the concept of the game, it's a survival game but it has some quite unique mechanics to it and systems. Yeah, we were inspired by Vampire Survivors but we didn't want to do the same thing, we didn't want to make like a red skin and that's it, so we added many aspects like for example characters level up and they don't have to automatically upgrade their stats, they can keep their points and then upgrade their constellation, which is something that we think it looks really nice on screen because it's like magical constellations for each character and they can make their, players can make their own builds and this way every run can be completely different because you maybe want to make a fire build or prefer to play with thunder or magic, maybe some characters are more like physical, so we have like a lot of content that people can enjoy and so the game doesn't feel the same every time. And of course it's called Nordic Ashes, so it's all about Nordic mythology, so tell me about the realms and how you guys are implementing them into the game. We were inspired very much by Norse gods for example and the good thing about Norse mythology is that we have nine realms and each realm is completely different, we have a realm Midgard for example is the realm of humans, Vanaheim is the realm of some kind of gods, we also have Asgard which is the typical realm that everyone knows with Odin, Thor and all those gods and the good thing also is we have Yggdrasil tree which is also a very known tree from mythology which will be the metaprogression tree, so every time a player finishes a run he gets like metaprogress leaves from the tree which he can upgrade so in next runs you can feel like more powerful. You guys are experienced already, you guys have been doing a lot of games before, so what can you tell me about sort of your experience at Noxfall and coming to this game which is perhaps for a broader audience, different platforms, what can you tell me about that? We started in 2016 so it's been many years ago, we started small with a mobile phone games and then we started like creating more things and each game we made was like an upgrade from the last one and two years ago we decided to make like the biggest upgrade we've ever done and went straight forward to PC games and that's how this game came to life. That's where you are now, okay what's the status of the project? The project is already released, it came out on April of this year and now we're working on a DLC that will come probably at the end of the year and we're also working on the Switch port. I was about to ask about the Switch. We believe it's a game that it's very like when you imagine yourself playing like playing on the couch with your Nintendo Switch and we think it's very optimal for that kind of release. Your 2D art is gonna look fantastic on the OLED screen, it's also available on PlayStation and Xbox or only PC for now? It's only Steam, you can play on Steam on our Steam Deck but our plans are to release it on all platforms. Anything else that you would like to mention about Nordic Access that we didn't touch upon during this interview?
We're really happy about the game, we didn't expect that many people to play it because at first we were like very new to the PC realm but we started a Discord community and streamers started playing and all the feedback we had from players and streamers was really good so we're really happy to be expanding this universe to whatever end. That sounds fantastic, thank you so much for your time Violeta, enjoy the show. Thank you."
