Manny Brown: Can you tell me a little bit about your development company (Ivolgamus) and how you came to exist?

Ivolgamus: Ivolgamus was founded over 5 years ago in 2002, as a console games developer. Our first game was a scrolling platformer for GBA and in those days there were only four people in the company. Now we have about 40 in our studio in Vilnius, working on a variety of games for different platforms including Sony PlayStation®2, Sony PSP®, Nintendo GameBoy Advance, Nintendo DS, Nintendo Wii and PC.

In February we are releasing our new game Fading Shadows on PSP. The game is being developed and published by Ivolgamus.

Manny Brown: Could you briefly outline the basics of the idea behind Fading Shadows, and what players can expect on release?

Ivolgamus: Fading Shadows offers players an entirely unique gameplay mechanic. It is a puzzle game, where the main character of the game is an orb, but the player cannot control it directly. It’s controlled using the beam of light that acts as magnet for the orb. Players can narrow the beam or make it wider to change the strength of the beam that interacts with the orb. Also the player can change the state of the orb to metal, wood or glass. Each state has its own advantages and disadvantages – for example the wooden orb can be burned by the beam of light, whereas the metal orb sinks in the water. All the states are required to complete the puzzles.

Players can expect many hours of immersive gameplay – the game has more than 40 levels.

Manny Brown: Story elements seem to play a fairly strong part in the overall experience; was the game designed with this in mind? Or was it retroactively fitted around the core concept?

Ivolgamus: The thing is – if we would take the story out of the game, it would still be great and unique puzzle game. The story does not affect the gameplay in any direct way. But actually the story was planned right from the beginning, and all Fading Shadows levels are closely related to it. For example, you start in the dungeon levels, where the boy is held hostage, and progress through the world to the Castle of Heaven, where he is rescued. So the story is there for players, who want more than just a puzzle, and offers a great chance to immerse into the game world and its events.

Manny Brown: From the brief playtest that we undertook, the difficulty level seems to be pitched fairly well for new players, how hard is it to balance a puzzle game such as this, and what would you say is the intended audience?

Ivolgamus: It was really a hard task to balance the levels to keep them progressing in difficulty steadily, and get to the result, that you can see now. The fact that our levels are related to the story made it more difficult, as we couldn’t say: “hey, this level is easier than this one, let’s just swap them”. But our plan to have the levels on paper first and then quickly prototype them helped us a lot. As for the audience, we aimed at 14 and older hardcore players. We tried to pace the game well, so players would find it more and more challenging. But these days you often see much younger hardcore players, so I think that they will be enjoying this game as well.

Manny Brown: The game features three differing states that the orb can be in (wood, metal, glass), can you briefly describe the impact on play that each has?

Ivolgamus: Yes. The orb can take three different states, and as I’ve mentioned, each state has different advantages and disadvantages. Metal orb – is the best state for most places in the game. It is easily controlled, because it can’t be burned by the beam of light. The metal orb is also the only state in which the orb can jump. However, we all know that metal cannot float and rusts in the water, and additionally to that the metal orb is too heavy for some puzzles in the game.

The wooden orb cannot jump and can be easily burned, but it is able to float, which is necessary for some puzzles that involve water. The glass orb is a ‘safe’ state – the player can transform the orb to glass at any time during the game by pressing the triangle button. (To change the orb to metal or wood you need to find special transformers). The glass orb sinks but does not rust, it can be burned by the beam but only very slowly, and it can be easily shattered in rough situations.

Manny Brown: Were there any other orb transformations considered at any point? How did the company come to focus on those specific three?

Ivolgamus: Very good question! Yes, we have considered other states too. For example, one of the states that didn’t make it into the game was a soap bubble state. In this state an orb could fly, but would burst even after a slightest collision. But in the end, we decided to keep only three states to make it manageable for the player. So after many discussions and testing, we settled on the current three.

Manny Brown: As the player can navigate the environment independently of the ball itself, how did the design of the game alter to accommodate this play mechanism? What sort of unique opportunities does this afford the player and designer?

Ivolgamus: Players can explore an entire level and plan their actions. This also allowed us to include some puzzles that can be solved even without involving the orb. For example, some switches placed on the walls can be switched by the beam of light on its own by reflecting light through the mirrors. But it’s not as easy as it sounds, the player has to turn the mirrors to be at the correct angles to each other to direct the beam at the switch.

Manny Brown: A lot of PSP games are routinely criticised because of the hardware interface itself, which seems to be inherently unfair to the developers. How has the team attempted to tailor the control system specifically for the PSP shortcomings, and what difficulties have been encountered along the way?

Ivolgamus: We actually enjoyed developing for PSP – it is a very developer-friendly platform in our opinion. And since Fading Shadows is an exclusive PSP game, we didn’t have to bother with porting any features from other consoles and weren’t forced to make any compromises.

Manny Brown: You mentioned previously that Sony has had a close involvement with the game; could you let us know which specific areas have they given advice on?

Ivolgamus: We felt a really good support from Sony during development. They helped us to develop our ideas further and encouraged us to think out of the box. Among other things, we exchanged ideas on making the orb/beam interaction work and how to make it intuitive for the player, and worked on the idea of limiting the text to a minimum, encouraging players to explore rather than instructing them. I think that we all wanted to experiment with this game as much as we possibly could and in the end it worked really well and the end product offers a totally fresh experience for the player.

Manny Brown: Has the team found any specific inspiration in other ball-rolling puzzle games such as Monkey Ball, or possibly Mercury? What would be the closest comparison to make?

Ivolgamus: We were inspired by numerous types of art, not just games. However, if we narrow this down to the games, I would say that the basic idea comes from real-life Mini-Golf, rather than ball-rolling puzzles. In videogames, the closest comparison would probably be Mercury though.

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