Launching in February 2024 on Steam and the Epic Games Store, Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior garnered early acclaim among critics and gamers alike.
Side is honored to have provided our services to Sand Door Studio, Fabloo Games, and Quantic Dream’s “Spotlight” division to help support Lysfanga in coming to fruition.
Read on to discover the origin story of the game, as well as the variety of work we contributed in the making of this unique title, from Art Production to Player Support.
Road to Launch
Lysfanga first began as a student project entitled “Lysfangha” at the ISART Digital school, an entertainment and video game arts school in Paris. The project made waves from the very start, being nominated in the category of Best Student Game at the 2022 Pégases Awards (winning the trophy in March 2022) while also receiving nominations at the 2021 Unity Awards.
The creators behind Lysfanga, Sand Door Studio, thus garnered the interest of French publisher Fabloo Games and Quantic Dream’s “Spotlight”—the division of Quantic Dream created to help indie and third-party titles reach new audiences. These collaborators knew this unique title deserved further support, which led to our Side teams being brought into the fold.
But first: what *is* Lysfanga and what’s it all about?
In Lysfanga players become Imë, the protector of the realm known as the “Lysfanga.” Gifted with temporal powers from the Goddess of Time herself, players can rewind time in combat to summon clones of their past-selves, helping them defeat enemies.
The main concept of Lysfanga is that each fight is more than a simple encounter with enemies: it’s also a puzzle to be solved. You’re given an arena filled with hordes of demons that you must defeat within a certain amount of time a certain number of chances. Once that time is up, you’re teleported back to the beginning of the encounter—this time with your “remnants” (clones) assisting you, helping eliminate the same enemies you brought down in the previous game loop.
With this innovative gameplay mechanic, Lysfanga feels like an expert twist on the Hack n’ Slash genre, one popularized by recent games such as Hades from Supergiant Games. Given the unique features of the title and its promising start, we were thrilled at the opportunity to play a pivotal role in the game’s development, supporting across Art Production, Audio, Localization, LQA, and Player Support. Let’s dive into some behind-the-scenes moments from our team members who contributed along the road to launch.
Art Production
By way of our experienced art production team at Side, we were proud to support with the creation of character artwork for Lysfanga. This included 2D and 3D characters set in ancient civilization-style realms, full of fanciful heroes and demons. The game’s art aesthetic takes its cue from historical depictions of warriors and spirits found in Persian armor, Mesoamerican art, and Japanese yokai (folklore). Our teams were excited to work within this unique artistic style!
The game art team involved with this project included Maxim Miheyenko, our SVP & Head of Art Services; Elvina Antonova, Art Producer; Nadezda Tarasova, PM; and Sergey Tatarnev, 3D Rendering and Lighting Artist. Check out the selection below of some of the whimsical, freaky, and endearing characters we had the chance to create.
“Kehor”, Imë’s brother
“Guardian”
“Swarmer”
“Boomer and Tiny Rat”
Voice Production
Side was also thrilled to provide English voice production for the title by way of our audio production team, with Casting, Recording, Directing, and Post-Production services.
As noted by Side London’s Production Manager Verónica González, “Working on this project was an amazing experience for our team. All 8 talents who worked on the game did an astounding job bringing characters to life.” Performance Joanna Green also felt that the team at Sand Door Studio was great to work with—they knew exactly what they wanted for Lysfanga, which is really helpful for directors. Joanna relates her positive experience with the talent as well:
“We had a lovely cast featuring some wonderful new talent. With a game like this it’s vital to have a likeable protagonist, and our lead actress Dinita Gohil really nailed that. Imë was feisty, fun and great to play. Dinita and Sid Sagar (the voice of Kehor) also complemented each other really well, as troubled siblings with beautifully understated performances. Meanwhile Chetna Pandya brought her rich, husky tones to the role of the goddess Qhomera, and Dana Haqjoo really delivered in his role as the Fallen King with an obsessive, relentless quality and a dark sense of humor. All characters big and small played a vital part in the game’s world-building and the creation of atmosphere.”
Localization and LQA
Our Localization and LQA teams also supported Lysfanga on its journey towards a global launch. Taking the game beyond its start in France meant that we needed to ensure all cultural and regional nuances were accounted for.
We provided Localization in 12 languages: Turkish, German, Italian, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, European Spanish, Latin American Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese. Side also provided Localization QA in all of the above, plus English and French.
As our Translation Project Manager Tyrone Waithe notes:
“Translating Lysfanga’s nearly 54,000 words into 12 languages was always going to be a challenge, as each language team needs to be on the same page when it comes to working out the nuance of their translations.
The Lysfanga development team provided us with a plentiful amount of resource of well-presented reference material and made themselves directly available to answer queries from the localization team during the translation phase, which lead to a very smooth process and end result. Our Side Localization and LQA teams were thrilled to have been part of this project!”
Player Support
Finally, our teams also delivered Player Support services to Lysfanga players in English, French, and Russian. With this multi-lingual and multi-regional launch, having player support services available in key languages was crucial.
Andre Rodrigues, our Player Support Operations Manager in Bucharest, Romania, shares how the experience went for the team at launch:
“Our Side teams were pleased at how smoothly Lysfanga released. The Lysfanga Dev and QA teams did an amazing job ensuring the game was bug free, resulting in a minimal number of issues being raised by the players, which in turn made our role of providing player support go very smoothly.
“On our end, we also greatly enjoyed testing and playing through the game to get to know it. The lore was expertly crafted, the art style and worldbuilding was amazing, and the combat felt really good! We absolutely were fans of the combat having a unique twist to it, with the Rewind System (Time Shift Remnants). We’re excited to see more players discovering this game, and look forward to experiencing future content from the Lysfanga team.”
End Game
All in all, Lysfanga was a fascinating project for all of our Side teams involved in supporting it. We were delighted to partner with the teams at Sand Door Studio, Fabloo Games, and Quantic Dream to help bring such a unique game to life—one that continues to reach new audiences with its stunning visuals and clever gameplay. And we can’t wait to see what’s on the horizon for the teams behind Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior!