What impresses me with Aeon of Sands, is the amount of choices you’ve left up for the player to take, giving the game a feel that’s almost “Choose your own Adventure”-like. We had the chance to ask Florian some questions, and here’s what he had to say:
Now all good things take time : it took our two-men’s crew 6.5 years of their life to make Aeon of Sands, a game that’s not only a love letter to the crawlers of yore, but a unique potluck of many inspirations, from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to the post-apocalypse genre, with some Lawrence of Arabia ’s zest thrown in. A recipe made in a dungeon crawler’s heaven, I told you! One was working on a 2.5d engine, the other on a user interface and character portraits, and both shared the same passion: retro, first-person perspective crawlers, think Eye of the Beholder and Perihelion. The recipe is simple, but it takes a rare chemistry a nd two matching ingredients: Florian, a software developer living in Germany, and Marco, an illustrator and artist from Italy, meeting each other on the Legend of Grimrock ’s website. Yet, that’s the real lore behind the game Aeon of Sands, the first released game from Two Bits Kid. How often does an exchange on a game’s forum evolve, not only in a sincere friendship, but also in a fully developed, commercialized game? Not often, I bet.
