We’ll be working on a review for Shadows of the Afterland, so I got in touch with Aruma Studios to talk a bit about the game and its development. Come check it out!
PS4Blog: Good morning! Thank you for joining us. Could you please help us get started by telling our readers a bit about yourself and your work?
Hi, thanks for having me! My name is Rubén, and I’m one half of Aruma Studios. We make adventure games with a strong focus on story. We released our first commercial adventure, Intruder in Antiquonia, back in 2022, and we have now completed our second one, Shadows of the Afterland.
For this second game, I took care of the writing, game design, and programming. I also developed our own in-house game engine, which we used for both of our titles. Silvia, the other half of the studio, handles production, marketing, and Spanish localization.
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PS4B: On that note, Shadows of the Afterland is out now on Nintendo Switch. How would you describe the game to those learning about it for the first time?
A woman dies, and when she crosses into the afterlife, something goes wrong: she arrives with the wrong memories, the memories of a completely different woman. Someone from the future.
That’s where you take control. You have to find out what happened, uncover why those memories ended up in the wrong soul, and face forces that reach across both the world of the living and the world of the dead. At the heart of it all is one question: is there still a way to save the people you love, including the ones you only remember from a future that has not happened yet?
PS4B: How long did it take to develop the game? Did it change much between the initial concept phase and the final version?
Core development took about two years, but from beginning to end, the whole process lasted three years. We effectively lost a year in the middle. Right after releasing the demo, we were ready to look for funding to finish the rest of the game. Unfortunately, that happened at a time when the games industry was going through a very difficult period, and it took us a full year to secure the funding we needed.
During that year, we could not make much progress on the game itself, but I used the time to port our in-house engine to Nintendo Switch. That ended up being very useful, because once the game was finished on PC, the Switch port went surprisingly fast. We completed it in under two months.
PS4B: With the game now completed, are you working on a new project or taking a much-deserved break?
A bit of both, but probably less of a break than I should.
I’m still doing some post-release marketing, and I’m also paying close attention to player reviews to catch things we can polish or improve. After spending so much time with a game, it is very hard to stop thinking about it the moment it launches.
Aside from that, I’m reading a lot and letting new ideas simmer. I don’t want to rush into the next production cycle just yet. I don’t have a concrete idea yet, but I’m already connecting some ideas in my head.
PS4B: And that’s all the time we have today. Would you like to add anything else before we go?
Yes. If anyone is interested in following our game development journey, we have a newsletter where we post updates approximately every other week. You can find it right here.
I usually share what I have been working on in quite a bit of detail, whether that is writing, design, programming, or the less glamorous parts of making adventure games as a small studio.
