James Petruzzi got into programming because he wanted to make games, but for a while he was making them in his spare time while working in software engineering. After partnering up with his high school friend Tim Dodd, they created Take Arms, a game which did well for the XBLIG marketplace, and while Petruzzi thinks it did pretty well, it wasn't "a big hit or a life-changing phenomenon" like they had hoped it would be. Petruzzi gave up game development for about six months after that, until he had the idea for Chasm, a procedurally generated take on Metroidvania platformers.
"I was playing Symphony of the Night for the umpteenth time," says Petruzzi, "and thought it would be cool if details about the game were different each time you played. For instance, the order of the rooms, what drops from a particular candle when you break it, items received, which enemies were in a room, etc. I decided to make a quick prototype with some basic room shapes, and found that it was indeed possible to assemble sections of the game together from pre-made pieces."
Although Chasm is procedurally generated, the developers want the game to feel handcrafted. "Each area features a large repository of hand-made rooms. When you start a new game, it essentially creates paths between known points using rooms from those repositories," Petruzzi says. "So the order you fight the bosses, get powerups, etc. will always be the same, but the room-to-roo...