AuraLab is a Russian game studio, founded in 2014 by Alexander Kuvshinov, Andrey Sharapov and Roman Povolotsky. The studio was started specifically for the production of the game of Karma. Incarnation 1 , which is now in development and will be released in 2016 on PC, Mac, Android and iOS. Andrey recalls the origins of the game.
Building the Team
After the cartoon was ready, Alexander and his former colleague, an Adobe Flash programmer, made the very first prototype where you could just crawl around one location. Later the initial team was disbanded and Alexander took this early prototype to the Games Jam Kanobu.
That was where we met, and later (at pre-production), the rest of the current team (Roman Povolotsky, Yuri Kuptsevich and Alex Starovoit), the veterans of Russian game development, joined us.
Together we did pre-production (concept, game design documents, prototyping in Unity 3D) and founded the company.
What we’re doing right
Since at that moment our team was consisting of experienced professionals who had previously released a lot of products being on key positions in major gaming companies, we were able to avoid a lot of “children’s” mistakes.
For example, already on early stages we adjusted the game design to the peculiarities of controls on mobile devices. We made detailed production and producing plans, game design documentation with meticulous descriptions of the rules of objects interaction, we described locations, created a detailed plot. By the way, the pre-production part took about six months, including early prototyping, as we tried a lot of options and did tons of adjustments. Basically, at the current stage we do the same: we constantly update already created levels and can change them several times after playtesting results. We initially reserved time for this in our production plan.
An important and correct decision was also to throw away the alpha prototype after we used it to work out the character controls, objects interaction and technologies manufacturing. As a result we got a brand new Unity project with net architecture rewritten from scratch with the experience gained during the prototype stage. So we got a good base that can be developed by adding functional features, without the need to change the main principles of the software code architecture of the project.
However, the progress was slow because it was production for our own money, which we had to earn at the same time, and it was not possible to focus 100% on the project. So we started to look for investments.
One big mistake we made
Initially, the story of the game was designed for 18 unique locations and about 6 hours of gameplay. We by no means wanted to reduce the number of locations, since it was a complete story adventure of Pip (the main character).
However, it was a huge amount of work and lots of animations particularly. For every character action we needed to render unique animations frame by frame. Also, we needed two versions for each location: one for the physical world and the other one for the astral vision, which the main character uses to find clues and hidden objects.
Also, since the main idea of the game was to show the laws of karma and the relativity of good and evil, a number of key quests needed to include several options for a solution - in a good or evil way.
Eventually we decided to split the first part of the game (Karma. Incarnation 1) into two episodes, but each with a richer gameplay. This allowed us to reduce the budget for the 1st episode without abandoning the original ideas and the quality of the product. We immediately found the investments and now the production is in full swing.
a Moral Choice adventure
We called the genre we’re making a game in a “moral choice adventure”. We believe this is a new genre! The main feature of the game is that you have to make a moral choice and you can clearly see how the laws of karma work and witness relativity of good and evil.
Most of the quests in the game can be solved in a good or evil way. And the “evil” way does not necessarily mean bad: sometimes the player is forced to commit a lesser evil to avoid a greater. At the same time, after committing evil deeds the main character changes his appearance: he grows horns and spikes. The other characters are starting to react to him differently. For instance, sometimes a quest character can get scared and run away, and this will open a new storyline. Thus the game can be played in many different ways.
Magic of the sound
One of the main USPs of the game, which we are proud of, is the unique atmosphere. And of course it is supported by sound. It’s a special thrill to observe how “alive” a level gets with music, background sound and characters’ actions sounds.
By the way, we already received 2 awards for the sound at various competitions such as Intel Level Up 2015 and DevGAMM 2015. The secret is very simple: the music has been created especially for the game by a team of musicians, our friends, the “aboriginal band ZMEIRADUGA”. They are real freaks, in a good way. Everything is recorded live, including music. They do music improvisation, that is - they record without composing or rehearsing beforehand. So they also hear what they play for the first time. Thanks God, they are talented! =)
The game was conceived as a series. Each episode is a new incarnation of the creature named Pip in a new world. But the devs separated the first incarnation into 2 episodes, so the first one will be released in 2016. After that the team plans to release a new episode every six months. The games will be available on PC, Mac, iOS, Android, and the AuraLab team is considering a release on consoles.
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