Looking at screenshots of Call of Saregnar, you might be forgiven for thinking it’s a long-lost RPG from the 1990s. The characters are photographed actors, the textures are grainy, and the environments are made up of flat 2D objects. In reality, Call of Saregnar’s a brand-new game from Slovenian designer, Damjan Mozetič. Envisioned as a return to the western RPGs of old, it draws from titles like Might & Magic VI and The Elder Scrolls II. The biggest inspiration, though, comes from Mozetič’s first love: 1993’s Betrayal at Krondor.

For Mozetič, Betrayal at Krondor was a formative experience. At age 14, he managed

to get his hands on a pirated copy of the game – a practice not uncommon at the time, given the state of the Slovenian market after the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991. The experience was like nothing he’d ever played before, and led to several late nights spent at a computer with a dictionary at hand to compensate for his basic understanding of English.

“I’ve wanted to make a game like Betrayal at Krondor since forever, because the sequel was never released,” says Mozetič, referring to Krondor’s cancelled follow-up, Thief of Dreams.

“I mean, there was Return to Krondor, but that was not the game that was originally supposed to be released.”

Spiritual successor

“Krondor had it all,” Mozetič enthuses. “It had great characters. It had a great world, which was Midkemia from (the series’ author) Raymond E. Feist’s books. So it had this really nice background to put a story in, and Neal Hallford, the author of the story and the characters, did a great job.”

Call of Saregnar is in many ways a spiritual successor to the original Krondor. Not only do both feature real actors in the role of non-playable characters, but the two games are also divided into chapters and include an open world you can explore almost from the beginning, populated with new missions depending on the chapter. They also feature turn-based combat and strategy elements, with the player able to launch sneak attacks on enemies or fall into ambushes in either game.

Making a game like this isn’t easy: financing and workflow aside, Saregnar uses techniques that aren’t common in contemporary game development. This often means educational resources are hard to come by, with his game’s aesthetic being particularly difficult to get right.

“There’s no info online whatsoever,” Mozetič says of his approach to Saregnar’s graphics. “I had to figure out by myself how to do it. For example, the trees were interesting. I eventually got Charles Thomas, a freelance shader programmer from France, to help me with a shader. I wanted those trees to have a shadow on the ground, so he helped me with that. Because, as the sun moves around, the shadows (need to move). The trees are still billboards, they’re 2D, but there’s a technique we use to project the same shape of the tree on the ground. It ended up looking really nice.”