Sea of Stars director reflects on the RPG’s development and incredible success

Thierry Boulanger has been in love with RPGs for practically his total life.

As the French-Canadian recreation developer advised The Escapist earlier this yr, some of his earliest reminiscences are of taking part in Chrono

Trigger along with his pal, despite the fact that they couldn’t really perceive the English textual content. Since then, he’s had goals of making his personal RPG, and for the previous 5 years, he’s gotten to just do that along with his Quebec City-based indie studio, Sabotage.

Enter Sea of Stars, a Chrono Trigger-inspired throwback that includes turn-based fight, a big pixellated world, and even music contributions from the iconic Square RPG’s composer, Yasunori Mitsuda. The story, which follows a celebration led by prophesized warriors Zale and Valere as they journey to cease the villainous Fleshmancer, can be the kind of quintessential traditional JPRG story.

For Boulanger, these childhood in Quebec of taking part in Chrono Trigger earlier than he turned fluent in English actually helped him hone in on all of the parts that make up an RPG in the first place.

“Playing those games without being able to understand what was going on really made me see the mechanics and the music and the more kinetic side of things, because I had nothing else to latch on to or to care about as I played it,” he explains. “And it made me search a little bit more, and find things for myself a little bit more, and tell myself a story as I was playing. And I think that all contributed to developing this kind of sense of wanting to make something because I had to make a story up as I was playing the game.”

Of course, language boundaries didn’t forestall him from nonetheless having the ability to grasp the sense of whimsy and journey of traditional video games like Chrono Trigger, and it’s one thing he wished to seize in Sea of Stars. 

“It’s not something that takes itself too seriously, but it’s still showing quality, and it can still have darker or more serious moments. I think there’s kind of this contract with the player where it’s like, ‘Look, you’re here to have fun,’ and for sure there’s a sense that the game should feel like they a day off, like a vacation, even within your ‘career’ as a gamer,” he explains. Part of that comes from the touching and healthful friendship between Zale, Valere and Garl (learn extra on that right here).

“It’s like, ‘Oh, this one is light, this one is a toy, I’m just playing it.’ In this sense, it’s back-to-basics; it’s a callback to how it used to be and why you fell in love with games in the first place.”

Put one other method: “You’re like the Ghostbusters of this world,” he says.

“It’s a beautiful world, it’s very pretty, it’s very vibrant, but sometimes you have to go downstairs to take care of something hideous. It has this sense of you’re taking on a responsibility and you’re protecting a world that you care to protect,” Boulanger says. “It’s very much about hope and about wanting to do good and the idea that if you try, you will succeed. That’s more the message that I’d like to leave.”

It’s a stark distinction to how the workforce felt earlier in the making of Sea of Stars. While all recreation builders have been affected in some style by the COVID-19 pandemic, Sabotage’s plans have been upended in a very notable method.

Given Sea of Stars‘ focus on ‘Solstice Warriors’ Zale and Valere, the workforce had the neat thought to announce the recreation in March 2020 throughout the Spring Equinox. As half of these months-long plans, flights have been booked to San Francisco to attend the Game Developers Conference for in-person displays alongside the launch of a Kickstarter marketing campaign. However, GDC was quickly cancelled as a result of COVID-19 lockdowns, and the workforce needed to pivot rapidly.

“We were looking for this thunderclap of ‘we reveal, there are articles, the campaign is live so we can converge everything.’ And a week before that we learned that it’s cancelled and everything, so that moment of, ‘do we still go forward, do we still launch the campaign?’ That was by far the moment where we felt the biggest risk because you can’t plan for the first-ever worldwide quarantine to happen. So that was a really big [challenge.]”

Ultimately, Sabotage did undergo with a digital reveal and Kickstarter launch, and followers rapidly took discover, making it the largest Canadian recreation on Kickstarter up to now with over $1.6 million raised. That early demand, coupled with the workforce’s award-winning debut title, The Messenger, led to many publishers taking curiosity, however Sabotage wished to self-publish for extra freedom and management. It additionally ramped up from seven folks working on The Messenger to round 25 builders on Sea of Stars.

Thankfully, that each one paid off. Fast ahead greater than three years and Sea of Stars is a large success. Upon its launch on August twenty ninth, the recreation was met with vital acclaim, turning into one of the yr’s highest-rated titles with a formidable 88 on Metacritic. What’s extra, Sabotage’s industrial hopes have been that it might promote 250,000 copies in its first yr; Sea of Stars hit that milestone in its first week.

We’re nonetheless floating,” Boulanger says with fun when requested about his response to the overwhelmingly constructive response.

“We rented a big cabin and we flew everyone in because we have people abroad; the studio is in Canada, but we have people in the U.S. and Brazil. And so everyone came to us, and we rented a cabin, we partied all together for four days… And we had the launch together, live and everything, and so that kind of gave us the moment altogether of ‘this is real, we’re passing the baton of this project, it’s now about the players who will appropriate it.’”

While he notes that there’s a bit of a “postpartum” in wrapping up the challenge in spite of everything this time, the workforce nonetheless chats every day and is general proud of the recreation and how gamers have been receiving it.

“We have a sense that we want to make something that will touch people and kind of stay with them. We don’t want to take ourselves too seriously, but we try to be mindful that people are busy — they have limited time, they have limited money and they choose to invest [in us],” he says.

“We think of it as when you come to us, because you have some downtime or whatever, we want you to go back to your life and feel like that time was well invested and it gave you what entertainment is supposed to provide. In this sense, we think of it as playing our role, if you will, so the reception feels amazing.”

Sea of Stars is now obtainable on PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch and PC. It’s additionally obtainable by way of Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium.

Image credit score: Sabotage