“Paris, 1960: The young French investigator Nicolas Legrand is closer than anyone has ever been to tracking down the ‘Raven’, a master thief wanted all over the world. He singlehandedly prevents the crook from pulling off a coup, followed by a pursuit across the rooftops of Paris. A pursuit with a fatal end…”

That is the back story to our game ‘The Raven – Legacy of a Master Thief’. The adventure takes place four years later and tells the story of the – real or assumed – resurrection of the Raven. The events in Paris are referred to repeatedly, so we thought it would be nice to show them as well. That gave us the idea to develop a small free game which would let players immerse themselves in the world of the Raven for the first time.

At about the same time, we were mulling over the design of the credits in the game. Since the story takes place in the 1960s, we wondered if we could animate something in the cutout animation style of the period. Ultimately, we decided against that, because cinematic credits fit in better with a game like The Raven. But the idea of doing something in the look of the ‘Catch Me If You Can’ intro was born.

From there it was only a short step to combining the two ideas. We wrote the dialogues and had the voice-over artists from the main game record them.
But the implementation of the interactive graphic novel was still a tough piece of work. We worked together with a friend, an animator from Bremen and, due to flu breaks and a great love of detail, we put more development time into the project than we had initially planned. But we think it was more than worth it.

It’s a nice little casual game that can be played for free and whets the player’s appetite. For those who want to know how the story of the Raven continues will have to play ‘The Raven – Legacy of a Master Thief’!

Play the interactive novel online or download the mobile version for iOS and Android.