Former Nintendo honcho talks spellcrafting in Mages of Mystralia

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Like Australia for mages

[Thanks to Dtoid community memberLong Johnfor the awesome video production work!]

When it comes to “indie publishing,” you made it clear that you see Devolver Digital as the best in the business. I wonder if in a few years if Dan Adelman may have a shot at that title? Though he’s not strictly a publisher per se, he does a lot of the marketing, messaging, and branding work that a traditional publisher might take on. With the highly successful Axiom Verge already under his belt, and hotly anticipated Chasm due for release any day now, he’s certainly off to a good start.

Mages of Mystralia is the latest game that he’s taken under his wing and it looks just as promising as the other titles he’s work on. It’s a beautiful top-down Zelda-like with a huge spellcrafting hook that allows for literally millions of magical variations. At least, that’s the plan for right now. We’ll have to wait and see how many actually make it into the game when it’s released in 2017. This is going to be a tough one to balance.

We also talked a bit about the state of the PlayStation Vita, and how Dan goes about selecting which games to work on. I’ve heard that he’s turned down some pretty high profile developers who were looking to collaborate. I guess working with Nintendo and Microsoft for years can lead a guy to have pretty high standards.