GamingBolt Exclusive: Interview with Frozenbyte CEO and Trine Designer: Mr. Lauri Hyvärinen

Today we sat down with a very special guest Mr. Lauri Hyvärinen who is the CEO of Frozenbyte and the designer of Trine. Trine is already released on the PC and will be released on the European PSN store today.  Find out what he has to say regarding Trine and the future of the game.

GB:  Where did the original idea for Trine come from?

The original idea of a platformer game was our producer’s, and that came in 2006 and was based on some very old MSX game. What Trine is now was re-designed in early 2008, including three different characters and object conjuring. All the visuals have also been created during the last 16 months of development.

GB:  What were the main challenges your development team faced?

We usually ask ourselves “what didn’t go wrong”, because there were so many problems involved. Most of the problems were funding-related, as we worked most of the time on the edge (and sometimes past it), but there was also numerous problems coming from the fact the scope of the game was changing all the time, and adding a console platform in the middle of the development didn’t help either. However, although the road was very bumpy and virtually all

mistakes were made, we are very happy with the end result.

GB:  Why was the game priced more expensive for the PC version?

It’s a complex situation and related to the retail side of things (which we can’t influence). We couldn’t really do as we wanted, because there were so many partners involved. Our goal is always to be fair in pricing (between platforms and also between currencies) and I think we’re now getting a little bit closer.

GB:  Will we be seeing a sequel or expansion at some point in the near future?

There certainly will be more Trine at some point, but when or what kind, we can’t tell yet. 🙂

GB:  When can we see the PSN version come out and how different it will be as compared to the PC version?

The European PSN release is on Thursday 17th of September! North American release is hopefully not far behind.

GB:  Are there plans for an Xbox Live version?

We have lots of plans and a version actually running on the development tools, but again this is something that is not in our hands. We don’t really know what’s going to happen.

We would like to thank Mr. Lauri Hyvärinen and his team and wish them all the best. Checkout for the full review of Trine this week on GamingBolt.com.