In my article on 8 Bump Combat-Based Games to Play in 2025, I highlighted an upcoming indie game called “Angeline Era.” It had a demo on Steam which I was alerted to and had thoroughly enjoyed, mimicking but significantly building on the bump combat of Ys games gone by.
On a whim I reached out to the creators Melos Han-tani and Marina Kittaka (of Analgesic Productions), and Melos was very kindly willing to take time away from development and sit down for an interview about their game.
Please go support Angeline Era on Steam and try out their demo today!
1) Let’s start simple. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what got you into game development?
Melos: I got into indie games via flash/web games, programming classes, Cave Story mods, and finally the IndieGames blog around 2008-10. Marina grew up making games with her older brother, mainly OHRRPGCE and GameMaker. We started working together remotely while we were in different colleges in 2012.
Generally, Marina does the art and story, I do programming and music. We collaborate closely on bosses/core game design, and for Angeline Era I led the level design.
2) What exactly is Angeline Era, and where can people play it?
Melos: The 3 key aspects are the action, exploration and story:
Action: Features a unique, fast-paced bumpslash-style system in 3D. Even if you’ve played hundreds of action games, Angeline Era will feel a bit novel! You walk into enemies to automatically attack, have a gun that only shoots up, can double jump. About half of the game’s levels are focused on action, where you reach the end of a stage without dying.
For exploration: You explore a 3D overworld. You can find levels to enter in that overworld. What’s unusual is that on the overworld, you have to reveal each level by searching for it! By beating the levels, you can change the overworld itself, letting you go deeper. About half the levels are focused on exploration: you might encounter enemies, NPCs, items, or little stories. Playing Angeline Era feels like travelling around a country and running into interesting things.
Regarding the story, you’ll follow the story of Tets Kinoshta as he tries to discover the secrets of a crashed Angel mothership. Along the way he runs into a variety of dark, emotional, and sometimes humorous situations, meeting Angel characters, and more warlike Fae.
You can play a short demo on Steam right now (as of September 2025) and the game will eventually be on Steam, hopefully this year.
3) Fans of the early Ys games will hear the phrase “bump-slash combat” and likely start salivating. How much did you draw inspiration from those titles while developing Angeline Era, and in what ways does your game differ?
Melos:
So the first thing to make clear to Ys fans is Angeline Era’s combat is different from Ys 1&2. We do share in common that you walk into enemies to attack, but Ys draws a lot more on dungeon crawlers, and its combat is more of a ‘bumpy push’. There’s the expectation you’ll make multiple dives into levels while leveling up.
Whereas in AE, we take a more Mega Man style of action design where you get one health bar at the start of a level and have to make it to the end. Some of AE’s fast pace is Ys 6/Oath-inspired, but there’s no EXP. Instead you can only level up by using a currency earned by beating levels for the first time, and there are some equipment/item options to let you try different strategies, but largely your level doesn’t heavily impact your success in the levels.
4) You went with a very pleasant low-poly aesthetic for your game unlike some of your earlier 16-bit releases. What prompted you to design your game in that way?
Melos: 3D is quite time-consuming to do and plan out art styles for. After our previous game Sephonie, which does have a lot of one-off, non-modular art, we wanted something that would be more re-usable, hence the cube-based (analogous to tile-based 2D art) art in Angeline Era. We’re able to re-use the various cubes we make across the game, so sometimes e.g. props made for a ship appear in a laboratory, etc.
Of course with this faster level-design/art process we ended up just making the game really big haha…
Additionally, I believe Marina was aiming to create a 3D art style that has a similar stylization of pixel art, where the characters read as cartoony abstractions. I think she did a great job pulling this off and it lets us have a somewhat theatrical presentation for the little cutscenes without having to spend as much time on the realistic issues you encounter when making more cinematic cutscenes.
Also we just like how low-poly games look! But like with all our games we’re not really primarily motivated by nostalgia or retro homage.
5) Over a decade ago, you released the Zelda-like game “Anodyne” and then later released a sequel, “Anodyne 2: Return to Dust” under Analgesic Productions. They’re both sitting at “Very Positive” on Steam. Did your work on these games have a significant impact on the development of Angeline Era?
Melos: Anodyne and Anodyne 2 both feature AE-esque combat rooms to some extent, but they tend to be in the context of Zelda-esque dungeon crawling (Anodyne) or puzzle dungeons (Anodyne 2). Still, that taught us a lot about the techniques of designing good enemies and combining them together to make interesting rooms. Knowing how to do this in the less-action-y context of Ano1/2 made it easier to figure out how, by contrast, to push the combat room idea into a more action-oriented context. Ano1/2 also taught us the value of restrained spaces. By focusing each combat encounter into a small room, it makes it easier to come up with unique combinations of enemies and create memorable levels.
6) What’s been the most challenging part of working on a “bump-slash” style game?
Melos: Speaking purely of the combat aspect of the game, there were challenges when deciding the final moveset of the game (we cut a handful of moves), and when figuring out how to make the minimal moveset feel meaningfully engaged with the enemies. Early on there’s a lot of back and forth with level design, enemy design, tweaking your moves to make the levels’ pacing feel interesting and work at a variety of difficulty levels. Once that clicks into place, it’s pretty straightforward to make levels and brainstorm new enemy types.
Other than that, the sheer scale of Angeline Era made it challenging to make.
7) Finally, what’s next for Analgesic Productions?
Melos: Probably a break, while doing some sort of brainstorming. For our next game we’d like it to be a bit less focused on building out unique levels and art for everything. Focused on conveying more with less… currently we liked the idea of having a “despatialized” game which puts more focus on interfaces, and less focus on fully representing a world through what we generally think of as level design. It’s hard to explain what this might be… but it’ll be unique for sure!
A million thank yous again to Melos for the interview. Be sure to go support Angeline Era on Steam and try out their demo today!
