This article originally appeared in Dev.Mag Issue 28, released in January 2009

To accompany our review of the game, Dev.Mag sat down with Daniel Remar, the sole creator of Iji, and harassed him with questions about the development of the remarkable game.

The main inspiration comes from my discontinued old comic, which in turn was inspired by another creation of mine that stemmed from playing Operation Carnage. Iji was at first supposed to be a survival horror kind of platformer, but changed rapidly once I begun working on it. It&#039s hard to say when or why it turned into what it is now.

All the names were pretty much randomized, and don&#039t have any special meaning. I wanted the main ones short and easily recognizable though.

I mainly wanted heavy or industrial metal music mixed with ambience, recorded live rather than in MOD format. Machinae Supremacy and their various works was a big inspiration, and one of the reason I like them is the optimism and believing in oneself that is often seen in their lyrics and musical style.

There was a lot of experimenting and testing with the music long before I wrote the general guidelines for the sound and feeling of each song. A mini-soundtrack was produced for the first demo of the game, which gave us experience in understanding each others&#039 tastes.

While the final soundtrack was being composed and recorded, I let Chris do pretty much what he wanted since I trusted him, and he knew what kind of style we were after. He liked driving, positive tracks rather than dark, depressing ones, and I thought that what he came up with fit the game perfectly. Only one song in the final batch (Organ Smash) was left out of the game. It&#039s included in the high-quality soundtrack download though, so don&#039t miss it.

To make the game&#039s resources I used Photoshop for graphics, Blender 3D for the characters, and Goldwave for editing the sound and voices, but the only "system" I could say I created was the polygon rotation and forward kinematics animation tool for the final boss. Unlike the other characters it animates in realtime with polygons rather than using rendered sprites, since it&#039s so large. Unfortunately this made it slow on some computers.

It&#039s all GM5, since it was too bothersome to switch to GM6 in 2005 due to the many incompatibilities, the loss of certain functions, the poorer sound and music handling and the loss of compatibility with Windows 98, among other things. I always work in GM5 unless a certain game would be impossible or more difficult to do without it, such as Garden Gnome Carnage&#039s rotation and surface effects. GGC also started out as a GM5 game though.