We had a talk with Ricard Pillosu, founder of Epictellers, a spanish studio currently developing the scifi RPG Starfinder. Based on a tabletop roleplaying game like Dungeons & Dragons, Starfinder aims to take the spirit of fantasy into the world of sci fi.
Recently, Epictellers ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to add quality of life improvements to the game, most noticeably voice talent, now led by director Neil Newbon, who played Astarion in Baldur’s Gate 3.
W4 Games:
Hello Ricard, first of all, congratulations on the successful Kickstarter campaign!. Can you tell us about how you started in the videogame industry and what moved you to start Epictellers to begin with?
Ricard Pillosu:
I’ve made many games, particularly shooters, over the years. I even directed a third-person melee shooter, among other projects. I didn't really enjoy playing those games, but I loved making games. My true passion is RPGs and I’ve been playing tabletop RPGs every week since I was sixteen, GMing campaigns for just about everything, and collecting an endless stack of books.
So if we were going to start a studio, I figured let’s make what we love. There’s a market for it, even if publishers don’t seem to see it. So we moved forward anyway.
W4 Games:
You think publishers are still not interested, even after Larian’s success (with Baldur’s Gate 3)?
Ricard Pillosu:
Larian’s success changed expectations. Money is volatile, nowadays publishers need audience proof. Kickstarter verifies that the audience exists for them, and brings them that feeling of safety. Same story with other strong Godot games that blew up on Steam and then got a publisher’s attention.At GodotCon last year we showed a demo for a game called Forbidden Lands, like Divinity or a Kingmaker. Talking to people (publishers), it seemed they wanted something more visually attractive. Publishers focus heavily on marketing, the Steam page and video must be super sexy. Swords and dragons help, but at RPG scale, unless you are Larian it is very hard. We started conversations with Paizo and found out that they were open to license Starfinder, a setting we always wanted to work on, so we jumped at the opportunity.
W4 Games:
And how did switching from fantasy to sci-fi affected Starfinder from a game design perspective?
Ricard Pillosu:
Storytelling is trickier, like modern movies with cell phones, instant communication breaks classic structures. In fantasy, you spend weeks crossing a forest to find the villain’s castle. In sci-fi, you check the wiki and call people. In Starfinder there is “the Infosphere,” something like the internet. The narrative must assume constant comms. Combat also changes, longer ranges, cover, snipers, you do not want fights across four screens in isometric. Animation is harder, Starfinder has many species and rigs, from felines to six-armed small aliens to gas blobs with tentacles. We are building systems to toggle extra limbs, tails, and so on. We cut features like flight, levitation, zero-G, and space combat to keep scope under control.
W4 Games:
Sounds pretty complex, even after removing those more difficult features, you still have a lot of quality content to deliver. How do you deal with the “every game must be Baldur’s Gate 3 now” perception?
Ricard Pillosu:
We try to be different from the get go: we use illustrations, closer to a visual novel, inspired by Persona, manga, and European comics, to be clear and affordable.
Another thing that’s very costly to replicate is motion capture, it’s too expensive and time-consuming, and their setups hook into Unreal. We would have needed to build our own real-time preview tools in Godot, doable but weeks of distraction from the main game development.
Knowing these limitations, and our artistic sensibilities as well, we planned the final scope, but we fell short in areas we liked. Combined with having no publisher, we had to do our own marketing. We started from zero, and rule one everywhere is, announce early, then promote. The first route was Kickstarter, classic RPGs get funded there, people still love them, so Kickstarters usually do well.
So we said, let’s do Kickstarter. It was terrifying, but it worked!. The roughly half-million is to add voice acting, a free extra DLC with more races and classes
W4 Games:
You were telling me you worked a lot with Unreal in the beginning, how was your first experience with Godot?
Ricard Pillosu:
When I decided to found the studio, I evaluated the tech landscape of engines. Unity’s modern installer and licensing turned into a headache even before their policy changes. I considered writing my own engine. I thought that it is feasible, but you need two years and three people full-time. Since we would focus on doing this RPG, we wanted to specialize and not burn years on developing tech.
I listed engines, including a few obscure ones, and Godot. I checked Godot, saw I could use C++ and the editor is built with the engine, very smart, exactly what I would do. Godot 3 was at the end of its cycle, and looked promising. I was skeptical of GDScript, I am a C++ person, but it worked well, performance was fine. Then with Godot 4 we tried Forbidden Lands in 3D, with eight people, we did six months of work, four to build and two to polish
Productivity-wise it’s a beast. I tell my ex-students, there is no technical reason today to pick Unity for a small 2D or 3D indie if Godot fits.
If we can do a 30-person AA RPG in Godot, you can do your indie game. It is not just because it’s cheaper, even if Godot were more expensive than Unity I would still pick Godot. The inertia is strong though, teams already shipped games in Unity and build their tools around it do not want to change, that is totally understandable. But if you start today, Godot is a better choice.
Godot is one of our star decisions, especially working remotely. Many still think Godot is at a “toy” level because they only see beginner posts online, but it is not a toy anymore.
W4 Games:
Indeed, we don’t have many huge Godot projects yet, so perception can skew. We think this will change in the upcoming years.
Ricard Pillosu:
On executive boards where people move tens of millions, value perception is tied to price. Unreal is seen as better than Unity because it is more expensive. Open source in games, beyond great libraries, has not been relevant historically. I used Linux all my life, use open source whenever I can, and working with Godot on Linux is a pleasure. Godot changed that equation.
W4 Games:
You mentioned that visual presentation was the main hurdle when showing off your game to publishers, do you think using Godot plays any part in their decisions nowadays?
Ricard Pillosu:
To my surprise, no. That mindset is fading as more indies hit with unusual tech. These days when I say we use Godot, publishers are fine. With press too, they care more about whether Starfinder has spaceships than which engine we use. Reactions have been positive in the last two years.
W4 Games:
Many people choose Godot because it’s open source, but do not leverage it. Did you plan on engine customization, encryption, or modding?
Ricard Pillosu:
I liked having C++ available, that was on the checklist. GDScript won me over and we use C++ only when needed. For encryption, we looked into it. Being able to add engine features means the game’s fate is in our hands. We have plans for releasing a modding toolkit and working with Blender and Godot allows us to be very accessible to the modding community.
W4 Games:
Finally, what would you tell people starting a commercial game, those devs who are not newbies, and want to make a living from it?
Ricard Pillosu:
Choosing the right game is 80% of your success. Kickstarter has best practices, page length, color contrast, a 60–90 second video, these improve accessibility a few percent.
I have seen terrible Kickstarter pages raise millions because the game was interesting. We expected 300k and 5k backers, and the results were far beyond that. ($725k and 11,700 backers, at the time of writing, with the Kickstarter campaign still running.)
¨Make a game people want, and one you like making, find the overlap between profitable and passionate. ” —Richard Pillosu
W4 Games:
Thank you so much for your time and congrats on the Kickstarter.
Ricard Pillosu:
Thank you, happy to continue the conversation.
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