Cris Tales developer discusses the game's unique feature of letting you see three time periods at once

Cris Tales is going to be one hell of a unique experience. One of the game's key features is letting you see three different time periods all at once. It's crucial to the entire experience, and as you might guess, it makes for a pretty tough development process! Siliconera talked to dev Carlos Rocha Silva to get more details.

S: When going through an area, people see every time period at once, due to the crystal overlay. How did you decide on the perspective and did you immediately know this was how you wanted Cris Tales to look?

CRS: Not at all; we were prototyping this a few years ago, and it was due to the really difficult task of imagining a game where you could actually see the three time periods at the same time. We didn’t know how to show that idea, so we started using a lot of placeholders to make that idea a clearer one, and after a lot of prototyping, it just clicked. We even knew this was the right perspective before we knew the game was going to be an RPG.

S: Could you give an example of how you would make a character or enemy design and then present its different stages of life?

CRS: It’s really thought out from a mechanical perspective; for instance, we can have an enemy that’s infected in the present, but that infection was created in the past, and in the future, it creates a completely rampaged beast. It’s more a question on how do we imagine an enemy through different moments in time? What’s that enemy trying to tell us? What’s his story? Imagine an enemy that is a brute in the past, but through time it evolves, and it becomes a magician in the future, then in the present it would be a mixed warrior, having some brute force, but also some magic at his disposal.