Shadowmatic, a Challenging and Captivating Puzzler
Last month, the game Shadowmatic received the Best Technical Achievement Award and the People’s Choice Award during the 12th IMGA, imgawards.com reported. We met Masha Grigoryan from Triada Studios, who describes the game as a “challenging, captivating and mind bending puzzler, designed to please one’s brains.” Simple and plain things can seem unexpectedly different and mind blowing if you try to look at them from a different angle!
TELL US ABOUT YOUR VICTORY…
Well, we were very surprised and grateful for the People’s Choice Award. We couldn’t be more thankful to our audience for voting, we saw the buzz on social media and thought there might be some chances to win the People’s Choice but we were shockingly surprised while getting the “Best Technical Achievement” award. The developers and nominees out there were very talented and skillful proving great technical excellence so we didn’t expect to win in this category as well. It was a great surprise and it really meant a lot.
WHAT INSPIRED YOU WHEN MAKING THIS GAME?
Starting from 2007 we thought to try our hand in making computer games. We have put a very high and ambitious target – a triple-A game for PC. For the beginning we decided to prepare a demo for a future shooter. We started to develop our own engine for PC and we have to say, that we achieved some serious results. Visually, it was more compelling than its counterparts of that time, however, unlike them, it was only 30% ready. We were working on the engine on our own time, outside of our main activities and not surprisingly, after a while we realized that we won’t be able to handle that scope of work within a reasonable time.
It was then that we decided to temporarily abandon the PC project and take the first steps in gamedev for iOS. AppStore wasn’t so saturated with all kinds of content then. Of course we weren’t thinking of a shooter anymore and were trying to define the concept of our future game. We were hoping to make something special and different from thousands of other games. In parallel with idea brainstorms, we were doing a reworking of our engine so that it would work on iOS. So we chose the idea of Shadowmatic since it would enable us to demonstrate the strength of our engine – photorealistic real-time 3D graphics. It’s certainly not as realistic as it was for the PC, but we think that the visual goal is achieved.
ANY NEW GAME OR PROJECT COMING OUT IN THE NEXT MONTHS?
We have some exciting plans for the future of Shadowmatic but can’t go further into the details at the moment!
