Right after the international launch of our first game, Sorgina: A Tale of Witches, via STEAM, we would like to take some time to talk to you and dig into the origin of our second big project: Ferox Anima, which is of a very different nature to the first one.
If we talk about an idea, the truth is, our first project, was actually Ferox Anima and our second one was Sorgina. However, their developments happened in the opposite order.
Ferox Anima has a much bigger scope than Sorgina and its design has suffered many changes throughout the last years, for that reason, its development was put off for a long time, until we found the game concept and design that we really believed was the best possible one.
During all this pre-production and planning period, we had time to design and develop another project with a much smaller scope, like Sorgina, which helped us to know ourselves better as a team, to learn about how to take on a big project and to improve our organizational skills.
Ferox Anima, started with a simple concept: collectible creatures. That first idea gave birth to a world and context of which hunters, elements and many other ingredients of the game are a part of. All of them, encompassed by a background, lore and story of which the current game will only inherit small parts.
The first iteration of Ferox Anima was an RPG, with a gameplay design that could partially remind of games like Pokemon or Monster Hunter. After months working on paper, designing and defining the game, we took a small break to look at our design and analyze it and we came to a conclusion: we liked what we had, we thought it was a very interesting project, but it was way beyond a scope we could handle.
However, we believed that the world we had defined and many of the main gameplay elements had great potential, so instead of starting a new design from scratch, we chose to use what we had as the base for our final design.
From the ashes of the first iteration, we came up with the idea of reducing the game scope by focusing on the combat, which led us to turn it into a competitive multiplayer game.
This new development is still a titanic task, however, we believe this is a task within our capacity. We think it is better to take a step back at the right moment in order to choose a new path and keep on walking, than moving forward non-stop following the wrong path.
If you would like to know more about the development of Ferox Anima, in future articles, we will dig deeper into the development process and we will reveal more information about many of the elements that became less relevant when changing the direction of our game, turning it from an RPG into a multiplayer game.
