Hello adventure game enthusiasts! Let me begin by introducing myself; my name is Evgeniy Lebed and I am one of the developers of Aura: Fate of the Ages and the sequel, The Sacred Rings. Our project leader, Sergey Nartovich, has once again given me this honorable task, no sarcasm intended, of writing these developer diaries. In this first diary I will walk you through a few of the basic steps involved in developing The Sacred Rings.

The first step in making any adventure game is to design a suitable and entertaining storyboard and plot. This is where we encountered our first major difficulties. For many days, and sometimes nights, we sat at the office planning and drawing this storyboard. I'm sure that you can understand where the difficulties arose here; everyone wanted to input their opinions about how the story would take shape, and in most cases, all of the opinions contradicted each other. One major difference that The Sacred Rings is going to feature is a much more developed plot. Like I said above, we have spent countless hours trying to develop an entertaining chronicle that would appeal to everyone. Since there were so many of us trying to input our ideas, we resolved that it would be impossible to merge all of these ideas into one concrete path, so we decided that in the game the player would sometimes be able to choose different paths to take in order to finish the game.