Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled was originally made on the GBA, but when the GBA's life passed, it was decided that they would port the game over on to the Nintendo DS. RPGamer interviewed Vincent Dehaut, who is part of the Studio Archcraft staff, to get some details on the game.

Full interview is in the source.

Back around 2006, details about a new Game Boy Advance game known as "Project Exile" began to emerge. This game gave off a strong SNES-era vibe as far as its visual presentation went, but little else was known about it. However as the end of the GBA's lifespan hit, the decision was made by the game's start-up Canadian developer Studio Archcraft to port the title over to the Nintendo DS instead of continuing on with the GBA version. Earlier this year, the newly named Black Sigil: Black of the Exiled was picked up by publisher Graffiti Entertainment. With the game expected to be out later this year, we decided to dig up a few details about the game, so we contacted Studio Archcraft and the rest is below.

Quite a few of us here have been following Black Sigil since it was "Project Exile" for the Game Boy Advance. How did this team get together and what inspired you to create Black Sigil?

Vincent Dehaut: Pierre Leclerc, the lead programmer, and I are long time friends. We had toyed with the idea of starting a game development studio since high school. Prior to starting Studio Archcraft, Pierre had attempted several programming projects, during one of which he met Maya Anderson, who became our lead artist for Black Sigil. Eventually, we just realized that there was no point in waiting to launch the studio, so we did.

Being such a small studio, what challenges have you had?

VD: The first and foremost problem was funding – no publisher is going to fund a first project from scratch, so you need either a provable revenue stream or assets and/or people willing to secure a loan to obtain funding from banks. We had none of those, so we had to make do with basically whatever we could scrape together, and do all the work ourselves.

Our lack of experience was the other big hurdle – reading books on game development and writing design docs during math class does not prepare anyone for the reality of game development.

tyranitar24 via rpgamer.com »