Project Atius Update #6 Interview with Zack Bogucki

Once again, welcome back to the Project Atius Development blog. As promised, today I’m going to be talking to our head writer Zack Bogucki. As it turns out, he is also our sound guy so we are going to chat about that as well in this special combo interview.

So let’s start with the sound first, when you were first starting on the sound what was your first vision for the music?

I came in on the project really early, so at the time, we weren’t sure exactly what kind of game it would be apart from “fantasy with RPG elements.” So a lot of my early attempts were very in-your-face high fantasy, lots of melody driven strings and woodwinds. It wasn’t until we started fleshing out the game a bit more that we realized we would need something more ambient and mysterious.

Right, so were there any specific instruments you wanted to use when composing the music?

From the start, I knew I wanted to use a lot of ethnic percussion alongside harps and strings. I envisioned this island of gods to be very earthy, and it needed to tiptoe the line between beautiful and menacing.

Cool, enough about music though. Let’s talk story, can you fill us in on the overall world this game takes place in?

Sure. It all takes places on a mysterious island in the middle of nowhere that was once a thriving home of the gods. It’s where they’d go to be worshipped, receive tributes, that sort of thing, so it’s dotted with altars and elaborate underground temples. But Atius, the god of light, and Tirawa, god of darkness, get into a huge fight that essentially seals the island off from the rest of the world, and traps the gods there. So by the time the player shows up a few thousand years later, it’s very desolate. The gods themselves have gone into hiding in their respective temples and have essentially all gone mad, and Atius and Tirawa are still locked in eternal combat. Of course, starting the game, you know none of this, so it was really interesting to plan out two intertwining stories that drive the game’s past and present.

Let’s talk about the sword, it’s a pretty important part of the story.

Yeah, definitely. It’s the “god-killing sword,” which Atius had forged to rule over the other gods. The player finds it shortly after showing up on the island, and discovers that she can wield it and use it to cast magic. So it’s basically the game’s main weapon, and gives the player the power to fight back against the corrupted gods. Since it also plays a pretty substantial role in the story, we wanted it to be this massive, ornate blade. That way, it seems that much more important, and when they discover massive gates and altars to Atius, the player can easily recognize the similarities. So in a way, we wanted the sword to not only build up the main character in the player’s mind, but also the final boss.

Lastly, were they any major changes you had to make to the story since we got farther along?

There haven’t been so many major changes as there have been a lot of tiny developments and tweaks. Once we decided on the main themes we wanted for the narrative side of our game, it was just a matter of fleshing out that world, as well as ironing out little kinks and holes in the plot. It’s been a very organic development, I think, and the story seemed to kind of grow out of itself.

So there you have it, the sound and story behind Project Atius. Big thanks to Zack for answering my questions. Keep on coming back for updates on project Atius.

Cheers,

Robert