EA Originals and Zoink Studios have released a new blog post for Lost in Random, the single player narrative adventure due out September 10 that will take players through the dark, twisted and unpredictable Kingdom of Alea.
Written by Olov Redmalm, creative director and lead writer of Lost in Random, the post delves into the inspiration behind the title, the details of the various story elements, and the unique themes, characters and lore that make the game so exciting. Olov also discusses some of the title’s lesser-known variables that help make its gameplay distinctive, including the dual personality of the Mayor of Two-Town, the giant board game-inspired arenas, and how the whole world of Alea has his moods and characters.
Lost in Random: the team and the realization
“Our team – explains Redmalm – is made up of 40/50 splendid Zoinklings located in our office in rainy Gothenburg (Sweden). It’s the biggest team we’ve assembled for a project so far, going from 10/20 to our previous Fe and Ghost Giant titles. It has been a great ride and we are all excited to launch this project around the world ”.
Then he continues talking about the making of the game: “During the development of Ghost Giant, we realized that we wanted to go into a dark atmosphere with our next project. At Zoink we usually start a project with the setting, the atmosphere and the art; so we sat down with a couple of artists and started drawing characters and places out of context, inspired by old and new fairy tales we love. We studied the scenery and long shadows of Shaun Tan’s paintings, examined the materials and animation of Laika’s films, and the concreteness of Studio Ghibli’s strange creatures.. At that time, Artistic Director Victor Becker had joined our team: he was a creative force that took the whole team into another “stunning” dimension ”.
“From the beginning – she admits -, the protagonist was a young girl who made her way into a dark fairytale world, but obviously we lacked a huge ingredient: that gameplay could it have been hypothesized? So when Zoink development manager Klaus Lyngeled showed us this drawing of a girl with a dice wandering through a giant world of board games, each of our heads exploded with ideas.. From there, everything quickly turned around, in a world ruled by chance and living dice ”.
The inspiration for Lost in Random
“Lost in Random took inspiration from real situations and fairytale scenarios. How many times in our uncertainties of life we say that there are situations of “roll of the dice”: something that we cannot control, but that can guide our destiny. Then there is often the anxiety and pessimism linked to the fact of seeing many situations in a negative way, they seem distant things from us in some ways, but if we think about it we have all experienced them at least once in our life “.
“In addition to this there are several themes, such as the brotherhood, personal training, the search for one’s own path and much more. When we found a thread that seemed relevant to us, then it wasn’t difficult to write it all up ”.
“If we watched Alice in Wonderland? Yes, it was a source of inspiration. There have been situations or objects that have turned on the light bulb to try, with our interpretation, to insert things into the game that would give something unpredictable to the development of the plot ”.