"World building has taken us years" on Rain of Reflections

Lionbite Games has been working on Rain of Reflections for a fair while now, which is why we were particularly excited to talk with game director Victor Lionhead at Gamescom in Cologne about the project, which he says is a "genre-blend between adventure, very heavily dialogue-driven story, and also we have this turn-based encounter system on top of that".

The difference with this last point is that it's "motivation-based, and so instead of us having hit points on our units and characters, we're really trying to make it personal, so they all have this motivation mechanic which kind of translates into anything that happens during the encounter. It's really a tug of war in that sense."

"It's complex under the hood, but the idea is that you're not supposed to... you don't have to understand the mechanics of it to actually appreciate how it affects your characters. So the idea is that it will intuitively feel realistic, like in the context of the characters, the situation, and everything like that, so that's been a huge challenge for us, of course, to find that."

Later on in the interview Lionhead says that "the world-building has taken us years," and he considers the first chapter a "full game" in itself too, although a focus is coming on two different characters, offering alternate views on the world.

"It's a focused story. It's really an indie game," he added when talking about managing expectations. "It has this pacing of maybe a movie, in a sense, but you're always free in your own tempo and pace to explore the environments."

Does all of this sound like a recipe for success?