At the increasingly enjoyable PC blog Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Keiron Gillen has up a post on the making of Shiny’s Sacrifice . A reprint of an article he wrote for the PC Format site, and with extra materials, it goes into the origins of the title with game designer Eric Flannum. From the article: “‘One of the biggest things which stood in the way of Sacrifice appealing more was that there were so many different and new things in it we were asking a lot from the player as far as what they had to learn and accept … From the visual style, from the lack of a disembodied camera … RTS players especially had a lot of new concepts to wrap themselves around’ Of course, these ‘problems’ were also some of the things which absolutely distinguished the game. ‘It was definitely one of the strengths of Sacrifice - its wacky visual look,’ Eric considers the issue, ‘but at the same time … well, there’s something about ‘an archer’ which communicates on a very basic level what that unit does. People don’t have to learn. But when you’ve got a little pyromaniac, there’s an extra step of learning. They don’t inherently know what he does.’” At the start of his post, Gillen mentions the retrospective piece on the game he wrote for his personal site back at the end of last year, which is also well worth reading. I have to admit, I’ll take almost any excuse to talk about this game; it’s a sorely underappreciated title..