Frozenbyte are in the process of holding an ‘Ask Me Anything’ event about Shadwen and what went wrong with Trine 3. This is in part to generate more interest in their inventive promotional event for Shadwen, whereby the more people who play the free demo, the lower the game’s price will go.
The scheme seems to be working fairly well in terms of getting people to play, as the price has now fallen just under $24.00 USD.
On the topic of Trine 3’s failure and how this ultimately led to the development of Shadwen, Frozenbyte CEO Lauri Hyvärinen admits that “We built our success solely on Trine franchise, and with Trine 3 we destroyed all the hard work overnight, leaving us with very few pieces to start over with.”
A great deal of work on Trine 3 went into 3D movement, hence its use as a foundation (along with time manipulation mechanics) for Shadwen.
Hyvärinen also reveals that the Frozenbyte team tried to create a new, original title after Trine 2, but this did not succeed, so the developer returned to Trine. “We [then] started working on Trine 3 but had still appetite for something different. This resulted us making the wrong choices and changing our crown jewel to something else.”
“We are still proud of what we achieved, even it fell short. With Shadwen I’m hoping we can start with a clean slate.”
