Developer Diaries: Evilibrium: Soul Hunters (#1)

On the pages App2Top.ru the history of the development of the game Evilibrium: Soul Hunters begins to share the St. Petersburg studio ORC WORK. In the first essay, the producer of the project Sergey Himmelreich talks about the world of the project and the goals that faced its development.

On July 20, 2016, the game “Evilibrium: Soul Hunters” received the Indie Prize – Best Audience Choice Casual Connect USA 2016. For us, this is definitely a milestone that finally determined the choice of the path that the ORC WORK team has been and will continue to follow.

How did it all start?

Of course, from history. My close friend and I were discussing the topic: what if the world would not be the way we imagine it today?

Alternative history in general is an interesting thing. There are familiar personalities, events, geographical points in it, but you change the conditions a little, and you get a completely different world at the output, which could have been if …

It was ”if“ that became the basis for building the game universe ”Evilibrium”, which captured me so much that I can hardly fit all the possibilities and events of this new world in my head.

The Evilibrium Game Universe

Evilibrium is an amazing world in which fantastic creatures and real events are intertwined, as well as the personalities of our history.

Imagine that Victor Frankenstein is not just a fictional character in Mary Shelley’s novel of the same name, but a real person who changes the course of civilization with his discovery. It is Victor who opens up the possibility of catching the soul of a dying creature in a special trap, enclosing the soul in a reactor and receiving electricity from it.

Soulreactors are becoming a reality, they are being produced on an industrial scale with the money of the Rothschild family.

Now it is a new world where all the mechanisms work on electricity generated by soulreactors, inside which the souls of dead creatures work tirelessly.

As a result of the active use of souls in the world, rifts arise – the penetration of parallel worlds, from where alien and dangerous creatures break into us. And then there are hunters, adventurers, attracted by the thirst for adventure and profit, for the sake of obtaining a rare soul of a creature from the rift and selling it to another collector-a rich man on the black market.

Soul technologies allow you to “pack” the souls of creatures into small cards, from which you can “project” the soul into the etheric field at any time, receiving a temporary material copy of the creature (in fact, the entire bestiary fits into a small deck of cards). A trained person can control such creatures mentally, using them, for example, as weapons!

It was hunters who were the first to use “pocket” armies and practice mental control over 2 or more projected creatures.

This is where the story of the game “Evilibrium: Soul Hunters” begins. The story is about brave adventurers who are ready to look beyond our world for the sake of extracting the souls of the rarest creatures!

It is important to understand that the world of Evilibrium is being developed, first of all, as a large, expandable universe, on the basis of which it will be possible to create games, comics, books, animated films, movies and much more.

I want to believe that someday a big movie will really be made in the universe of Evilibrium!

Development goals

The game was originally planned as a mobile collectible card battler, as both I and part of the Orc team already had experience creating similar games. But we have deeply revised the typical approaches to creating battlers, bringing significant adjustments to our project.

We set a goal not only to make our project different from others, but also to rethink the player’s experience, give him more vivid impressions, create the illusion of a deeper immersion in the game universe.

The graphic style of the game (comic, dark, Gothic) was also chosen for a reason.

Firstly, it most corresponds to the atmosphere of the universe: the stratification of society, the loss of faith in the divine essence of the soul, the growing decadence in the aristocracy.

Secondly, when choosing a style, we really liked the graphic and color-specific drawing in Mike Mignola’s Hellboy comics, as well as a similar art style in the famous Darkest Dungeon game. As a result, these projects became the graphics references for our game.

As for the UI, initially we were faced with the task of making the interface consistent, adaptive, with a clearly readable structure of division into content and active zones and well-integrated into the atmosphere of the game world. I think the team coped with the task perfectly.

An important task for us was to make the fight, on the one hand, simple for beginners, on the other, deep enough in tactical terms to maintain interest and unlock new opportunities at later stages of the game.

The game turns out to be so multifaceted that it is impossible to tell about everything in one short article. But this is also the format of diaries, when all aspects of development can be revealed gradually, savoring especially interesting moments.

A little more than a year has passed since the start of the project development, and we are already close to the softlonch, full of expectations from interaction with the audience. There are still several months of hard work ahead with a small audience before the world release.

I believe the next story will appear just when the game will already be available on the Kongregate website.

Did you like the format? Let me know in the comments.

If you have a desire to participate yourself – write to press@app2top.ru . We will consider applications, if they are interested, we will definitely respond.