Interview with Nik Hagialas of Red Essence Games
Nik talks to us about his studio’s latest title, ARPG Traveler’s Refrain.
Traveler’s Refrain. Red Essence Games
I interviewed Nik Hagialas, co-founder and lead artist of Red Essence Games, about his studio’s latest release, Traveler’s Refrain. It’s a story-driven, top-down action-RPG in the vein of classic Legend of Zelda titles, with a unique song-spell system where you play notes on your instrument to cast magic during combat. Traveler’s Refrain features a rich world brought to life by hand-painted art and animation. You can hear more from Nik and studio co-founder Arman on the Red Essence Games Podcast. Thanks for taking the time for this interview, Nik!
Nik Hagias. Red Essence Games
Geekly Grind (GG): What are the inspirations behind Traveler's Refrain?
Nik Hagialas (NH): As lifelong gamers who have had controllers in hand since the 90's we have had a lot of inspiration to pull from. While I don't think we have a specific game inspiration where we were like, "let's make THAT", we were heavily inspired by the classics we grew up with - Legend of Zelda (gameplay), Final Fantasy 7 (story), and more recently, Nier Automata (mood).
Traveler’s Refrain. Red Essence Games
Geekly Grind (GG): There are so many great top-down 2D action adventure games — how did you differentiate Traveler's Refrain from your inspirations, to make it unique? What were your goals in making the game, in terms of design or design pillars, and do you think you achieved them?
Nik Hagialas (NH): I'd say the biggest differentiator for us would be the visual style and tone of the game. It's very "us.” Those old-school RPGs I mentioned always felt like an epic quest, and we wanted to deliver that feel in a hand-painted, story-heavy, fully voice acted way.
Because I have a background as a concept artist / illustrator, it was a no-brainer for us to utilize my art style to develop the hand-painted look of the game. In terms of gameplay, we wanted the game to feel more like what you would expect from a modern hack-and-slash game combined with technical spells and abilities. We wanted the player to really feel like they were quickly dodging, slashing, and casting song-spells by our protagonist, Traveler.
I definitely believe we achieved the vision we were trying to create with the game.
Traveler’s Refrain. Red Essence Games
Geekly Grind (GG): What inspired the protagonist to be a musician, and for playing music to be part of the gameplay?
Nik Hagialas (NH): Both my business partner, Arman, and I are guitarists and huge metalheads, so we thought it could be interesting if the protagonist had some sort of falling out with his love of music when he lost the woman he loves. To push our personal references even further, I have Greek heritage, and the instrument he plays is based on a Greek bouzouki, a 6 string guitar-like instrument. Originally the instrument was just used to heal the main character, but we decided it would be more interesting to create this button command system, where you hold the trigger to strum, and tilt the stick to input commands, to cast different types of spells.
Traveler’s Refrain. Red Essence Games
Geekly Grind (GG): Do you have any personal connection to the game's story? Lost love, conflict between technology and nature, there's a lot going on here.
Nik Hagialas (NH): The feeling of being the "struggling artist" is one that I understand all too well, so we injected that feeling into our character to give him something internal to be confronted by. He comes into the magical forest bearing no instrument, and soon the forest reveals the magical instrument to him - the thing he has pushed to the side for some time. This internal conflict, along with his search for his lost love are the driving force of the narrative, and the characters he meets along the way begin to push him along a path he wasn't anticipating.
Geekly Grind (GG): What have been your biggest challenges in making Traveler's Refrain?
Nik Hagialas (NH): Our biggest challenges came from just how ambitious we wanted this game to be, considering how small of a team we had—while also not having the resources to work on the game full time for the majority of its development. The game is a pretty solid 10-12 hour RPG, featuring 1000s of frames of animation, with all unique hand-painted art, and full voice acting. This was Arman's and my first actual Steam release, so there was a lot of learning the Unity engine, and creating tools to make us more efficient, on top of all of the asset work that needed to be done.
Traveler’s Refrain. Red Essence Games
Geekly Grind (GG): How did you get started developing games, and what made you decide to launch an indie studio? Is there a significance behind the name "Red Essence Games"?
Nik Hagialas (NH): Before forming our studio, I was working consistent gigs as an artist in the entertainment industry and they all happened to fall through at the same time. I had always wanted to make games, so I found some YouTube tutorials and dove into Unity. My business partner, Arman, is a friend of mine from high school, and I knew he went to school for programming, and I also knew he was into similar games as me, so we decided to form our studio and make cool artsy games together! We felt that Red is the color of passion and drama, which we feel is the essence of the types of games we wanted to make, so - Red Essence Games.
Geekly Grind (GG): How big is your team? Do you rely heavily on contractors to fill in the gaps? If so, how do you coordinate with devs that aren't in-house to ensure you have a unified vision?
Nik Hagialas (NH): Our core team is 5 people: 3 artists including myself (Alice, Paloma, Nik), 1 programmer (Arman), and our musician / audio engineer (Milan). Besides our core team, we hired voice actors who are also touring musicians, with multi-genre artist Essenger leading us with the role of our protagonist, Traveler. Besides this team, we hired contractors towards the end of development to help us with things such as coloring / shading animation frames.
Thankfully today we have very efficient tools for communicating online, so it was never very hard to hop on a Discord call to work together with any of our members. Also because Arman and I were doing the heavy lifting of the engine work, we could allow our artists / musician to do their tasks and be creative, and then meet up to do reviews in a call. It also helped that our artists had a similar style to mine, and our musician had an extreme understanding of the vibe we were trying to build with the game.
Traveler’s Refrain. Red Essence Games
Geekly Grind (GG): What are the biggest lessons you learned from making previous projects that you applied to making Traveler's Refrain? What lessons have you taken from this game that you'll apply to future projects?
Nik Hagialas (NH): Before working on Traveler's Refrain, we had built a sort of "proof of concept" demo project which laid the foundation for this project. We learned from that project that we needed adequate level building tools, and we also learned to be efficient when designing character and enemy movements so that we weren't wasting time with needless animations, while still maintaining the "cool" look.
The biggest lessons we learned from this project would be more "thinking ahead" and R&D. Because this was our first project, it was difficult to know what we would need to complete development. Now that we know what it takes, we would focus more on planning out tools ahead of time, being more stringent about the types of mechanics we integrate, and writing code that we know can be easily built upon to help us negate the need to redo elements of the game, which we had to do sometimes with Traveler's Refrain.
Traveler’s Refrain is available now on Steam.
