A cyberpunk-themed platformer game with a speedrunning twist, Aeon Drive sees players take on the role of Jackelyne, a space ranger desperate to get home. Armed with her power sword and teleportation dagger, she must find all the Drive Cores to fix her ship – and save the city from impending doom. Aeon Driveis available now on PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation and Xbox. We chat to the developers, 2Awesome Studio, to find out more.

How did you come up with an idea for the game? Did you deviate from the original vision during the development process? Why?

Developing the idea for the game was an iterative process. We had some concepts and ideas we wanted to experiment with, which were focused around the concepts of adaptive difficulty challenge and player death. Many games have removed the old concept of lives, and a lot of progress has been made to avoid the typical difficulty sliders (Easy/Normal/Hard). However, we wanted to give players more control without being explicit about it. Thus, we did a research prototype proposal to the Creative Industries Fund NL, which is the Dutch cultural fund for architecture, design and digital culture, mixing these fields in all kinds of ways.

We received a grant from the fund to develop a research prototype where we experimented with these concepts, and that’s how the concept of AeonDrivecame to be. Those experimental prototypes were heavily playtested with community players, we threw some ideas out and quickly added some others. For example, the original prototypes were using much longer levels with several checkpoints. Another prototype that was in use for quite a long time gave players the option to kill themselves mid-level and carry over the leftover time to their next run. Turns out everyone disliked that idea!