Zeboyd Games has finished a successful Kickstarter campaign for their upcoming RPG Cosmic Star Heroine. PSU sat down with lead writer, Robert Boyd, and asked him about the history of the company, experiences with creating a game on the PS4 and Vita, as well challenges in making an RPG.
Smith: What got you inspired to make video games and take that leap past normal fandom?
Boyd: I’ve always wanted to make video games since I was little, however there were 3 main triggers that pushed me over the edge from fan to indie game developer: 1) Xbox Live Indie Games making it easier than ever for anyone to release and sell games on a home console. 2) Playing the Guadia Quest game in Retro Game Challenge and thinking "This doesn’t look like it would be that hard to make!" 3) Almost getting hired by NIS America and deciding that it would be easier to just make my own games as an indie than it would be to get hired by an existing video game company and work my way up.
Smith: How did Zeboyd Games get started? What is the history behind the company?
Boyd: In 2009, I released two text-based interactive novels on Xbox Live Indie Games, Molly the Were-Zompire and Epiphany in Spaaaace! As you can imagine, neither sold especially well so I decided I wanted to make something more ambitious. Unfortunately, I’m a terrible artist. At around the same time, my future partner, Bill Stiernberg released a fan-remake of the old Atari 2600 classic, Adventure, but with classic NES/SNES RPG-style graphics. I saw the project and liked his style of art and asked if he’d be interested in teaming up to make an 8-bit style RPG. He agreed and together we made Breath of Death VII: The Beginning.
Smith: Cosmic Star Heroine is taking influences from Chrono Trigger, Phantasy Star and Suikoden. Can you tell us what those influences are and how we will see them in the game?
Boyd: Besides "Make a good game" and "Keep the pace brisk" major aspects from each series are as follows:
Chrono Trigger – Art Style, Battles directly on maps, Multi-character unite abilities.
Phantasy Star – World & Character Design
Suikoden – Base Building and Plot
Smith: As a gamer who is not interested about graphics, the minimalist, retro style is very appealing and eye-catching to me compared to the big budget titles. Was it a love of retro RPGs, funding, or a combination of many influences that made you go in this direction? If money was not an issue do you think you’d creatively decide to stick with the retro feel to set yourself apart from others?
Boyd: All of the above! We love retro style visuals & think there’s still a lot of room for improvement in that field. Plus the 2D retro style lets us build content much quicker than we would be able to with 3D graphics.
@page
Smith: What was the inspiration to make this game and this story as opposed to a squeal to Breath of Death or Cthulhu Saves the World?
Boyd: We’ve long wanted to do a sci-fi tribute to the Phantasy Star series so this felt like a good chance. We may do sequels or remakes to Breath of Death & Cthulhu Saves the World at some point but for now we’re sticking with new games.
Smith: A lot of RPGs have some sort of message in the story. For example Persona 4 dealt with the issue of identity. Even though the game is supposed to be more light-hearted, what kind of message does Cosmic Star Heroine want gamers to think about or is it just fun without a message?
Boyd: Yes, we have some ideas for messages we’d like to explore with Cosmic Star Heroine, but we’d rather people experience those through playing the game.
Smith: In the Kickstarter video the first thing that tries to wow potential supporters and buyers is the music. Why did your team decide to pick Hyperduck Soundworks over other potential audio productions?
Boyd: Our friend and fellow indie developer, Dean Dodrill (Dust: An Elysian Tail) recommended Hyperduck to us so we used them for our last game (Penny Arcade’s On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 4). We thought that they did an amazing job on the soundtrack and just as importantly, they were a joy to work with. They did great work at making each song unique & appropriate for the needs of the game in that area and even managed to get together a group of talented singers (Laura Shigihara, Dale North, and Lucian Dodge) for one of the songs. We’re really excited to be able to work with Hyperduck again, especially now that we’ll have more of a budget.
Smith: Reading over your Kickstarter notes, it was mentioned there were issues with stat balances in previous games. How has that process been going for Cosmic Star Heroine since that update? Was it a hard discussion and debate to have one stat comprised of many buffs as opposed to the more traditional one stat equals one buff?
Boyd: It’s been going really well. The big problem in our past games was that they punished balanced builds and unduly rewarded unbalanced ones. You might have someone who was really good at physical attacks and poor at magic attacks to the point where all of their magic attacks were completely useless. They might have a Fireball spell, for example, but even against an enemy with high physical defense, low magic defense, who was weak against fire, you’d still end up doing more damage with one of their physical techniques. Conversely, characters with balanced stat growth tended to be terrible because they ended up being mediocre at everything. With our new setup, this shouldn’t be a problem. We’ll still have characters that are naturally specialized in particular areas, but more balanced characters will be useful too.
Smith: You have already passed your minimum Kickstarter goal. How does it feel to have that weight lifted and still have another week to go?
Boyd: So relieved. I expected our Kickstarter campaign would be stressful, but I had no clue just how stressful it would actually be. And this is with a campaign that has gone well; I feel terrible for everyone with a campaign that has struggled.
Smith: What has the experience been like working with backers who get to help create content for the game thanks to their donation tier? As the writer, was there a risk in your mind that some of them might want to create entirely inappropriate content for the game’s theme?
Boyd: Actually, we won’t be doing any of that until after the campaign is over. Our experience with similar things (like cameos in our previous games) is that backers usually want what’s best for the game and don’t try to insist on anything truly inappropriate.
@page
Smith: With a plethora of new indie games coming out every month, and at an exponential rate in the future, what will set your game apart from all the rest?
Boyd: Although there are tons of indie games coming out all the time, there are relatively few indie RPGs. And in any case, I don’t really see it as a strict competition. The more indie developers there are making high quality RPGs, the more visibility indie RPGs will have in general meaning better sales for everyone!
Smith: Your previous games were either on Steam or Xbox Live. What prompted you to switch over from Xbox Live to PSN for the initial release of Cosmic Star Heroine?
Boyd: All of our games that were on Xbox Live were on the Xbox Live Indie Games service so since that program has been dropped for Xbox One, we needed to find a new platform. Sony has been very outspoken in their desire to partner up with indie developers & the PS4 & Vita are both great pieces of hardware so the choice was easy.
Smith: Can you go into detail about the behind-the-scenes life of working with the three publishing platforms (Steam/Xbox Live/PSN) as an indie developer?
Boyd: We can’t go into great detail, but I will say that everyone we’ve dealt with at Valve, Sony, and Microsoft has been very helpful & has done their best to make things as easy as possible for us.
Smith: For the laymen fan who knows absolutely nothing about programming, can you explain what the differences are for programming a game for the computer as opposed to the PS4 and PS Vita.
Boyd: Other than having to deploy to a console or a dev kit for testing, there isn’t really any major difference between computer & console programming. In both instances, you’re mostly sitting in front of a computer, typing. However, I will say that the previous generation of consoles had drastically less RAM than you’d typically find on an average PC so loading & unloading of assets efficiently was more important.
Smith: The game Suikoden is based off of the famous Chinese novel Outlaws of the Marsh (Shui Hu Zhuan). Having your BA in Mandarin Chinese, and being the writer of the team, are we going to see any Chinese influenced games from Zeboyd Games in the future, like a Romance of the Three Kingdoms inspired RPG? Have you already thought about future games or are you solely focused on Cosmic Star Heroine to even think about anything else?
Boyd: Dream of the Red Chamber: The RPG! But seriously, if we were to do a Chinese-themed RPG, we’d probably go with Mulan, lots of room to do some interesting things there.
Smith: Do you have any plans to re-release any of your previous titles on PSN?
Boyd: No, porting our older stuff to the PSN would be hard enough that all things considered, we’d be better off remaking them. However, fun though that would be, I think we’ll probably stick with making new games for now.
Smith: Have any shout-outs for the internet?
Boyd: It’s easy to forget about it since it came out in the first half of the year, but I think Monaco: What’s Yours is Mine is quite possibly the best game to come out this year so far on any platform (and not just counting indie games).
The developers of Defender’s Quest (one of my favorite tower defense games) just launched their website for the sequel so I recommend checking that out.
An indie game that I loved in its original free alpha form, Desktop Dungeons, is finally getting its official release next month. Looks to be a huge improvement over the already brilliant original game; I can’t wait!
Finally, if you like hack-‘n- slash, loot-based action/RPGs, Grim Dawn (from some of the developers of Titan Quest, currently in alpha) & Path of Exile (just finished beta) are both great. I’m a huge critic of the free-to-play business model, but Path of Exile is one of the only games to do it right. All the purchases are completely optional and are for stuff like costumes and guilds, and not to unlock or speed up the actual gameplay.
I am definitely excited for the future release of this game. For more information on the behind-the-scenes inner working of it’s creation you can check out their FAQs page.