Q&A

You focused on Ori’s controls and feel first. When did the story come in?

I actually started writing when we didn’t even have an artist on the team! Some bits of the story are similar to the short film I wanted to make while I was studying sculpture, and I just took bits and pieces of that. Then, when we saw the storyboards coming together, we made some changes to finesse it and make it that much more emotional.

What have you learned from making Ori?

I think we just became more experienced, and obviously we now have more talent in the studio. With Ori we had this thing of wanting to prove ourselves. In terms of design, we wouldn’t have really changed anything. The lessons we learned were more just experience: how we approach a problem, how we avoid freaking out when something doesn’t work, and so on.

What were your aims with creating the Definitive Edition?

When we released the game, there were still some people saying, ‘Hey, it would have been cool to do this and that’. For example, the teleporters – that was something we initially wanted in the game but just couldn’t do it technically. But people wanted it, and we knew we had to do it right. I love that about Blizzard – when the game ships, it’s not just, ‘OK, you paid your money, we took it, that’s it’. It’s, ‘No, let’s go back and give it a little bit more love’. If people have complaints and the complaints are valid, then it doesn’t hurt to spend a little bit of time on it to refine it and give it that extra polish. I want people to be able to play Ori ten years from now and still think, ‘OK, this is a great game’.