Creating Infernax, the retro game of Berzerk Studio’s childhood dreams

blog.playstation.com:

Hey dudes, Mike from Berzerk here with some fresh blogpost for y’all. With Infernax coming February 14, the day of love, we figured we’d let you in behind our velvet curtains to show you what makes this retro action-RPG tick. 

Part of what made us want to do Infernax in the first place was to create a game the closest to something we would’ve played back when we were but wee childs. To be more exact, we wanted to have a game that looked like it was straight out of the 80s but would have never been released, a mythical game you’d talk about in the school courtyard, a game that had everything you wanted in your child’s mind.

So we went with that premise, instead of going with a 100% accuracy we decided to design the game around the imagination of a sugar powered kid; we took a skeleton of a few games we liked and powdered that with a ton of “no way” moments.

What if the game remembered what you did, what if it had way too many secrets, what if it was also disgustingly gory; it’s all of those things. The story is all built on your decisions, and those decisions guide what upgrades you get, what quests become available to you.

Fun part about that process is that most of the things we’d speculate games to be able to do (and by speculate I really mostly mean we’d lie our asses off for a moment of glory during recess) ended up in modern game design.

What we ended up doing was creating an evolutive narrative that took the player’s choices into consideration, every choice they’d make would move the story forward in one way or another. That in turn created a fun new dynamic that people would want to replay the game to see what would have happened if they did something different, and true to our younger selves we decided it would