[In this interview, first published in the November 2011 issue of Game Developer magazine, we chat with the DigiPen student team behind the stealth and action platformer It Belongs In An Ancient Ruin.]
It Belongs In An Ancient Ruin offers a tongue in cheek spin on Indiana Jones, tasking players with stealing ancient artifacts from museums to return them to their rightful place within some treacherous, underground caverns. We talked to the DigiPen student behind this stealth and action platformer to get a better look at the challenges and success they experienced when working on the game.
How did you arrive at the overall concept for the game? Did the premise come first, or was it mostly gameplay driven?
Grant Wynn, assistant producer: The overall concept for the game was fleshed out over time, but the original spark of an idea that snowballed into a game occurred when we were watching one of our friends play Minecraft. He accidentally placed a valuable block underground, due to some confusion over the controls, and I had to rub it in a little. I jokingly said, "What is this, reverse Indiana Jones? You're taking the valuables back into the ancient ruin?" Then came the fateful line that started it all from another friend of the group. Jared blurted out while using his best Indiana Jones impression, "It belongs in an ancient ruin!" One of my teammates turned and said, "Dude, game idea..." and so the game was born.
What tools did you use for the project?
Ansel Rognlie, technical director: We used OpenGL for graphics, FMOD for audio, SDL for keyboard and mouse events, as well as for wiring up OpenGL to Windows, XInput to support Xbox 360 controllers, and TinyXML for XML parsing.
For the game itself, we had to write the entire engine ourselves in C++. This entailed setting up and managing all the graphics and sound resources, game objects, tile systems, physics, gameplay, UI, messaging-basically everything that wasn't provided by the low-level libraries.
David Evans used GameMaker for prototyping, and I built a level editor in C#. Our art was done in Photoshop and Paint.NET, and our sounds and music were predominantly composed using MilkyTracker.
