Интервью со Swordtales

1. Let's start with basic stuff. Tell us a little about yourself: who are you, how big is your team, how did you get together, how did the idea of Toren came to you?
We met in a post-graduation of game development in our city called Porto Alegre, five years ago. We started to make Torrent as a conclusion work of this master degree. We had no experience in game development at this time; all of my partners came from others markets such as advertising, graphic design and software development. The idea of this game came from a simple concept about a girl climbing a tree. After that we started to add some abstract concepts such as the passing of time, the tower when she is in trapped and have only this tree as her friend. After some months of work, we had this entire environment created on a paper, and to make this happen we spend the last 4 years working hard on this concept comes to life.

2. Even in early trailers the game looked like a work of a highly talented professional artist. Can you tell us where did inspirations for your artist came from?
Our main inspiration is from the team ICO. We'd like to make a nostalgic game that evokes that feelings we had playing these types of Japanese adventures on the psone and ps2.

3. This is a little far-fetched, but your first trailer came out around 2011, so... Did you ever think that creators of Journey could peep at your world design and use some part of it? Or maybe that upcoming Hellblade's protagonist is somewhat based on Toren's? In other words, how do you feel about that maybe - maybe! - you inspired other developers?
Hahahaha this is a funny question. I never thought about this but if anyone who got inspired by something we made and created a cool game with this, this would be a honor to us!

4. The game's idea is based around the Tree of Life as the heroine ages and her character develops. What did you want to say with this, what did you imply? ...if that's not a spoiler, of course!
Toren it's a mixture of many mythologies, symbolism from different religions, occult sciences (mostly, we made a lot of references about that, it’s called Kabbalah). From the pop culture, Allan Moore's comics inspired us a lot.

5. As far as we know, you have somehow attained support of the Ministry of Culture of Brazil. How did you achieve that? Could that mean that Toren is a serious attempt of world's digital entertainment market entry for Brazil?
The Brazilian Government started to give some attention and support to our development scene, this happened because before us a lot of pioneers started to make the foundations of our industry. This type of help is not the only way to leverage the Brazilian game development market, it’s only one opportunity in the middle of a lot of different possibilities. That being said, there is a lot of other very good Brazilian games attracting gamers around the world. We are just one more studio in the middle of a good harvest of developers.

6. In one of the first interviews you said that you got the support of Sony, and so have full access to the Sony PS4 Developer Kit. How did you achieve that? Will there be any special content in the PS4 version of Toren?
In terms of content, PS4 and PC versions of Toren are equal. We are reached by Sony Latin America Incubation Program at the beginning of 2014 and we were invited to be part of it.

7. How was it to work with Sony? Could you tell us a little about their treatment of indie studios? I mean, sure, you got the DevKit access, but you didn't stop working with Sony there, right?
Sony Playstation created a special incubation program focused only in the Latin American indie studios. This program could provide us the dev kits and a special attention during the development process. Also, Versus Evil helped us a lot with the submission process and the final arrangements of Toren's launch.

8. Can you estimate the action-puzzle ratio in your game? We suppose, puzzle is emphasized more, but still many gamers would be excited to see something like combat mechanics implemented in Dark Souls or 2008's Prince of Persia. Should they expect this, or are you going the puzzle way firmly?
Toren it is a simple game in terms of game mechanics and action. The most part of the challenge is to interpret the messages and connect them with all the symbolism and dreamy atmosphere we are offering.

9. The supported platforms list is rather limited. Did you consider Xbox One, or maybe Linux? Why not, or if yes, why did you abandon the idea?
We'd love to make Toren for XBOX ONE too. But when you have an indie game and a small team, you need to make some choices. I'm saying that because we had entered in the indie program from XBOX only some months ago, so we didn't had sufficient time to work with XONE. Now, we are focused on give support to the PC and PS4 version and prepare to launch on MAC and Linux. Develop to other console may took a lot of time and we need to be sure all this time it Worth.

10. Thank you very much for your time! Some last general questions: how do you see the future of indie? Could this be the new route game industry should take? And if you want to tell something to our readers - your possible future Russian/Ukrainian/etc. fans - then feel free to!
We have a lot of interesting things happening at the same time in the industry. The competition between smaller titles (Indies or not) with AAA is getting harder. But at the same time, we have a lot of different ways to participate of the scene. I believe that the stereotype of the lonely indie developer making his game in his garage is getting even less present. What I see is a lot of indie studios working as small companies, making business with smaller publishers and taking care of their business with much more attention than never before.

I’d like to thank you for the interview and thanks for all Russian gamers (and all the people from East Europe) that supported us buying Toren. I admire the indie's development scene from East Europe and I believe we from South America have a lot of similarities and same challenges that yours, despite the weather being completely different. :D