The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing Interview

Post-release interviews for videogames are not all that common, outside of industry post-mortems, so it’s certainly appreciated to see that the Neocore Games team isn’t shying away from them, with the latest coming our way via True PC Gaming. Of course, part of the reasons they’ve been is that they’re promoting The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing II, but it’s appreciated nonetheless.

Here’s a snippet:

What are some of the successes and failures you learned from in developing The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing?

There were quite a few ideas that didn’t make it into the game after all. For example we thought other classes would not fit into the game world so well, and a deeper questing system would impact the fluency of the gameplay. So we went for a single but bigger and branching monster-hunter class with various different skills and a simpler story and quest system. Looking back now, these might not have been the wisest decisions as a lot of fans were missing these features from the game, but this is something we can learn from and we really want to listen to the feedback of our fans while creating the sequel.

We wanted The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing to be a fast-paced hack ‘˜n’ slash but at the same time we also wanted to spice it up a bit so we implemented a lot of humorous conversations and quotes and put more emphasis on the role of Lady Katarina, your companion. Based on fan feedback, this addition turned out to be very successful.

In its current form, how close is The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing to your initial vision?

Interestingly, the game we released is totally different from our original plans. The base idea of the game was born many years ago, but its development was put aside as we were working on other projects. Therefore, the game’s development was running in the background for years and it was like a hobby-project for us. The atmosphere and the target audience of the game was very far from what they are now. After Van Helsing was picked up by our team again, the whole concept was rebuilt. Probably the only thing that’s left intact from the original idea is the fact that the protagonist of the game is Van Helsing’s son.

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Please talk about developing the art style, level design and music for The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing.

The process usually starts with the narrative design, which is basically building the story and the world. Then, our designers create a design concept and plan the basics of the levels. After this, the idea gains shape and the actual levels and graphics are designed. Of course, it goes through a lot of polishing, and the music and sounds are implemented at this point as well to fit the atmosphere. Lastly, quest elements are implemented to the new world that’s shaping up in our hands and then we play it a lot to see where to add some extras like humorous banters or easter eggs.

Thanks, RPGWatch.