Interview with The Developer

Was there any inspiration for creating the game in this style aesthetically? if not, what made you decide to go about this way?

Yes! This movie was very much an inspiration for both the design and the art style. I do not think the audio was inspired by it, but you can read about the composers progress in our blog

What games inspired you to create Reus and its contents?

For the theme, there were, of course, several other god games: Populous, Black and White and From Dust. In the start, our lead designer Adriaan also drew inspiration from Football Manager as we were still thinking about customizing giant teams. In the end, we also drew inspiration from The Binding of Isaac for the meta-game. We really liked the unlock mechanics in that game and it helped us design the rather unique (at least we think so) metagame of Reus.

Did you have significant roadblocks/challenges upon making the game? if so what were they?

As you may know, we started the company with four computer scientists. This is not the obvious role distribution, but as one of us could draw really well, we thought we were fine. How naïve we were. A really important roadblock was the lack of artists. As we came to realize, Reus needed a LOT of content art-wise, while we had none to produce such amounts. We worked hard to find good artist freelancers and interns and this is how we solved that problem in the end. Another problem we encountered during the entire first three-quarters of the project was project planning. We had never worked on such a large project with such diverse people who worked weird times (about 15 people worked part-time on Reus).

Any future plans for the game that’s okay to reveal?

Yeah sure! Right now our first priorities are to port the game to Mac and Linux and localize it to several languages with community help. In the meanwhile, we’re also working on a free content patch. We are really thankful for the community’s response, and we feel it’s nice to support their experience for a while longer. For future plans on Reus were listening to a lot to the community. What do they think is missing in the game, or could make it a lot better? Further, then that, we have no plans. We really have a lot of options now, and we’ll have to decide what the Abbey wants, before working on any next game.