When lead artists Max Degen and Johannes Figlhuber began work on Ori and the Blind Forest, they were tasked with bringing to life a world that merely didn't withal exist. "In the kickoff, we had only very rough block-outs – you had your character and yous could run effectually, just the game itself was just blackness-and-white silhouettes," Figlhuber recalled. "We had to find something to bring all of this lite to life, and to create something with some story to it."

From early, the team was inspired past classic hand-fatigued animated movies, including "Princess Mononoke," the archetype Studio Ghibli pic. "I just dear the earth they created, and this depth," said Figlhuber. "The prince is an outsider in this world, and he's not actually wanted there – we kinda wanted to get this feeling for Ori. We want you to experience like a visitor in our foreign and beautiful world."

Indeed, as the titular Ori, the thespian can't help merely feel diminutive in the Bullheaded Forest, and this was a very pointed choice by the developers for a number of reasons.
"We wanted to thespian to feel very modest in this world – we wanted Ori to be very pocket-sized on the screen," said Degen. "This was a very conscious conclusion, both for gameplay reasons – you can see farther ahead, and have more than time to react to what's coming toward you – and to evidence the insignificance of the grapheme, who's very small in this huge and intimidating globe."

Creating this rather intimidating world was no pocket-size chore, particularly since Degen and Figlhuber were the sole artists for the majority of the project (another four artists were brought on for the final year of production). To give a sense of scale, Degen pointed out that there were over 90 unique tree graphics created for Ori, along with loads of leaf and branch graphics – which all had to exist combined.

"On elevation of that, we can requite each graphic dissimilar lighting, color, and motility sets, so the possibilities are actually endless," said Degen. "The overall style of trees, and the graphics in full general, change multiple times throughout the game. By and large speaking, we take over 7,000 hand-painted graphics in this game."
Considering the game was initially conceived as an Xbox 360 project, it started with a very specific technical ceiling that the team needed to work within. When it eventually became clear that the game was instead destined for Xbox One, these constraints essentially disappeared.
"We thought we were more limited than we were in the end, so [early on on] we sort of limited ourselves," said Figlhuber. "We went through so many iterations – and we had such great tools from the tech department – that we could just go crazy, and do everything we wanted. That gave us a lot of liberty to create all this depth and calorie-free, and make everything so vibrant. There were essentially no limits."

All of the piece of work put forth by Degen, Figlhuber, and the rest of the team at Moon Studios has resulted in a very unique, beautiful game. Ori and the Blind Woods is available at present for Xbox I – and you should check it out, considering you're in for something very special.