Interview with the Developer of Shadows of Chroma Tower

We were immediately captivated by the color palette and concept behind Shadows of Chroma Tower when they submitted for our May Showcase. We love unique dungeon crawlers especially when they’re as stunning as this one!

A huge thank you to the team for answering my questions about the game.

• Can you tell me about the team behind Chroma Tower and how you all got started working on it? 

We’re a team of just seven - tiny for a project of this scale, but confident and persistent. In 2022, we held an internal pitch contest here in Brazil to decide on our next project, with the goal of applying for the “Lei Paulo Gustavo” government grant, which funded various art forms, including games. Everyone contributed ideas backed by market research, and after exploring several genres - from cozy games to deckbuilders - we chose to make an Extraction ARPG game. We developed a prototype with gameplay, story, and visuals, applied for the grant, and were selected some time later. Production officially began in January 2024.

• Were there any other games in the Action RPG (or other) genres that helped inspire Shadows of Chroma Tower? 

Dark and Darker was a major influence, as it really reshaped the extraction genre in a much-needed way. Diablo IV is also a major inspiration, especially in how it deals with power fantasy and how it plays with scale and numbers in an ARPG setting, which is something we’re eager to explore with SoCT. 

• What inspired the unique art style of the game? 

At Double Dash, our past games - like Sky Racket and Jorel’s Brother - have always embraced bold, stylized visuals. So when we approached Chroma Tower, our first “serious-looking” game, we knew realism wasn’t our path. Instead, we drew from the comic-style art of old tabletop RPGs, game manuals, and Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books. Mike Mignola’s use of angular shapes and deep shadows in Hellboy helped define the game’s dark, dungeon feel. To balance that with color, we looked at Cam Kennedy’s surreal, saturated work on 90s Star Wars comics. That blend of moody shadows and vivid hues became our foundation, and through custom shaders in Unreal, we translated our concept art surprisingly closely into the game.

• Can you talk about one or two of the game’s classes and how they work?

I think the coolest one right now is the Weaver, our mage-type class. All his powers are fire-based, so he has to absorb fire from the environment to recover Mana quicker. There’s this fun balance of setting enemies on fire and then absorbing their flames to get more mana and then set them on fire again with fireballs and flamewalls. It’s kind of hard to manage at first, but we’ve seen experienced players learn how to clear entire rooms with it, which is pretty satisfying. He also has pretty good synergy with a Hunter wearing a Fire Quiver: flaming arrows turn into mana that turn into more fire and damage, it’s lots of fun.

• Can you talk about how leveling up your crafting in the game works and how it helps your friends on future runs? 

Crafting is part of the professions system in our game. The more you do it, the better you become at it. As you level up, you unlock better recipes that you can craft with resources found within the Tower. It’s standard MMO-like crafting, but it plays a huge role in a setting where losing your equipment is a very frequent occurrence. It helps mitigate the frustration of losing your hard-earned set.

• Can you tell me more about the feature Factions & Territories?

If you have ever played Helldivers 2, you know the thrill of fighting against a common enemy alongside an entire community, even if you’re not directly engaging with them. We wanted to explore that feeling in SoCT, so we made players choose one of two factions to play as a part of, and they fight over control of territories that provide bonuses to the dominating faction. And both factions have a common enemy - the Archmage, a non-playable faction that actually fights back in the war map.

• What kind of weapon would you choose if you were about to dive into a dungeon?

I’m all about the bow and arrow. I wouldn’t want to go near any of those monsters so the farther from danger, the better. Any dungeon crawler game, if you have a ranged option, I’m in. Which is funny, because I do love some melee in shooters.

• What does “indie” mean to you?

That’s a hard question. Most known “indie” games aren’t really “independent”, they have publishers, investors, etc., so it’s hard to pin that. I think, today, at least for me, indie is everything that is not AAA. Indie games tend to work faster and cheaper due to not having a big, or bloated, team. So… maybe that’s it? A game made by less than a certain number of people? I don’t know, it’s a blurred line. I think there’s a certain freedom with indie games that you don’t usually see, they take chances that AAA games don’t, and that usually brings out (or brings back) a lot of mechanics, gameplay styles and visuals that we don’t see in big, expensive games. 

Shadows of Chroma Tower is available to wishlist on Steam right now.