Based out of Las Vegas, Nevada, with a remote, dedicated team of developers, including yours truly, Anvil Drop’s title debut, “Anomaly 1729” will be released on Steam late this year. For those who haven’t heard of the team, you surely will, since everyone is hard at work, making sure the game is up to standards.
The game revolves around a robot named Ano, who’s definitely curious, and quick to get into a moral dilemma. Players will solve puzzles, and learn about the world along with Ano, before things take a turn for the worse.
Oddly enough, the game began as a college project, as Creative Director Donald Young describes:
” The founders of Anvil Drop all attended Full Sail University, and Anomaly, which was called C3 at the time, was our final project. It was a four-month project where we basically had to come up with a concept and take it as far as we could. The original idea for the world rotation came from Paul Winegardner. He had made a prototype where you had to shoot the walls or a room to rotate it 90 degrees, which in truth is not too far from how the game works now. “
Of course, starting as a college project meant having a lot of development issues, especially considering all the rotation and puzzle elements they wanted to incorporate. Luckily, the founders didn’t have to spend too much time on it. Young describes the process, saying:
“Looking back on it, we actually overcame most of the challenges with the design in those first four months. Things like giving the player the ability to rotate the world on all three axes, what limitations the player should have so that we could create interesting puzzles, and what type of puzzle concepts really complimented the rotation mechanic. There were a lot of paths we could have taken for the game, so I think it was good to weed out what didn’t work for us early on.”
They later submitted C3 into competitions and got into IndieCade’s E3 2013 Showcase. The positive feedback and reception made them want to finish the project. Ultimately, this led to Anvil Drop, and the current team. When asked how the vision has changed over the years, Young explained how a concept turned into a full-fledged indie:
“So we decided that we should turn it into a full-fledged experience, but in reality we only had a proof of concept. The bulk of the last two years has been spent building up the world, establishing the art style, and creating a lot of side mechanics that are used to compliment the world rotation. More recently we’ve been turning our attention to the specifics of the story and world design to make the experience complete.”
Players can now “expect a vibrant and dynamic world that’s full of interesting spatial-reasoning puzzles, a gripping story with a few secrets,” provided by a collaboration of Jake Ratcliff, myself, and Donald Young, and “hopefully a feeling that Ano has made an impact on Phiohm” by the end of the game.
While the game is due out this year, it is not expected until September – October. The team isn’t afraid to take another month or two to polish the details if they feel the need to, since the goal is to make sure the game is the best it can be. Stay tuned for further details on this, but in the meantime, check out the Anvil Drop website, where you can find details on the entire team, and game trailer.