A portion of a GreenlitGaming interview with Rain Games.

GLG: What inspired you to create Teslagrad? Where did the idea and concept come from?

RG: Back in 2010 when we started Rain we had a plan for our first title. It was to be a casual four player title mainly for console. The core concept was that of a contest of dominance between four nations, each with their own steampunk inspired technology. The game was called Minute Mayhem.

There are a few people with a passion for storytelling on our team, and we sat down and created a rich background for the nations and the characters.

Like most Indie companies we started with very little funding, and we could just afford an office. It was a space in a local artist collective, and it wasn’t great with regards to isolation. The winter 2010-2011 happened to be the coldest one in Norway for a long time. Things seemed a bit bleak, me and Olli were in office in full outdoors clothing trying to make typing possible with tealight candles.

This was when we went back and read some of our own lore. We fell in love with the backstory of Electropia. Olli envisioned a platformer that could use the same sort of unique artstyle we were using for Minute Mayhem, and I contributed with imaginging magnetism and electricity as a central game- mechanical theme for the game.

The idea would stay shelved for a time, but we were getting neither attention or funding for Minute Mayhem. Luckily we sent around the concepts for Teslagrad a bit, and trough a stroke of luck we managed to get a grant for it by the Norwegian Film Institute. It wasn’t mutch, but it got us started.

Teslagrad had great wind in it’s sails from the very start. It has stayed pretty exactly like envisioned trough the entire process. Here is a concept design from before we had a singe line of code.