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Drinkbox Studios unleash Severed on iOS

Check out our interview with Drinkbox Studio game designer David Rusak

Drinkbox Studios unleash Severed on iOS
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iOS
| Severed

For those of you out there with a penchant for the macabre and a taste for the surreal, you will find your cravings more than satisfied by Drinkbox Studios touch controlled adventure game Severed - which has just been released for iOS.

Severed throws you into a world of nightmarish fantasy, as you take on the role of Sasha - a one armed warrior. With your sword and your wits as your only weapons you must navigate your way through the terrors and mystery of your surroundings on a quest to find your family.

To complete your journey you have to solve a range of puzzles, uncover secrets, and battle past hordes of lovecraftian monsters. You do this all through the game’s touchscreen mechanics, which offers a variety of offensive and defensive techniques - adding an extra slice of tactile satisfaction as you cut down your enemies.

With its combination of responsive controls, unique visuals and fast paced metal soundtrack, DrinkBox Studios hopes Severed offers a real sense of excitement and action bolstered by a host of new features designed specifically for its release on iOS, including a new Casual difficulty mode, new game center achievements, plus graphical optimizations for Metal-enabled devices.

There’s a lot more to the game than that though, so we spoke with game designer David Rusak about he feels that Severed is another DrinkBox Studios success story.

What do you think your game offers that you can’t get from any other title on the App Store?

Severed is a pretty unique mix as a game: it combines classic dungeon crawler navigation with fast-paced, finger-swiping combat. As the game goes on, that combat quickly progresses from simple beginnings to something quite deep and tactical. The game follows a dark story in a creepy fantasy world, and rewards exploration and backtracking for secrets as you go on. For me as an iPhone gamer, this is the kind of involved, story-driven experience I often really hunger for out of the typically lighter fare you usually find on the App Store.

What challenges did you face during development, and how did you overcome them?

Our previous games have all been side-scrolling 2D action titles. Early tests for Severed proved that we could get a first-person dungeon crawler working pretty quickly in our engine -- but Drinkbox has a high standard of art polish, and we specialize in 2D art. So even though you’re down in a temple or cave, looking around yourself in 360 degrees, the game doesn’t employ any 3D art; it’s all 2D illustrations, wrapped around the camera in several layers. Getting this looking right took a ton of iteration, tweaking and trickery, but in the end we got to have both the immersive ‘3D’ world and the handcrafted look we strive for.

Will there be any differences in the game compared to the handheld/console versions?

A lot of work has gone into making the game control seamlessly on the touch-only interface of the iPhone/iPad. We’ve newly added a ‘casual’ difficulty mode option so more people can enjoy it, since the standard game was really geared to cater to hardcore console players. On iOS we take advantage of some fun platform-specific features, such as gameplay video recording with ReplayKit and uploading save data to iCloud so you can transfer between devices. We’ve also added some enhanced graphical effects across the game since the first release -- it looks gorgeous full-screen on a big iPad.

Which parts of the game are you personally the most proud of and why?

Having worked closely on it for a while, I personally am really attached to the story. Internally we really fleshed out the backstory of this nightmare world that the main character, Sasha, finds herself in, the story of her family she’s trying to recover from it as well as the other denizens of the world she meets. We always focus on keeping plot from getting in the way of gameplay, and so we tell a lot of this in-game just through hints and implication. Players have told us they’re really moved by the way the plot unfolds and are left chewing on a lot of questions about the world, which is just what we wanted.

Do you have any tips or advice to users on how to play the game?

Because you swipe your sword 1:1 with every touch you make, a lot of people naturally want to kind of flail at enemies as soon as they appear onscreen. This stops working quickly once you start fighting two or three foes at once, all of which require different techniques to take down. To keep up, you really have to take a step back and think tactically about how best to get through each encounter, plan the order in which you’re going to take them on, and stay on your guard to parry their attacks.

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Severed is available right now on the App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/severed/id972657175?ls=1&mt=8