Post-PAX Announcement Cosmic Star Heroine Q&A

Generally speaking, the response to our Cosmic Star Heroine teaser trailer was very positive. Sure, there were some people who just used the announcement as an excuse to complain about indie games or try to start system wars, but most people were very positive. Of course, some people had some legitimate questions about our announcement & why we’ve done things this way so I thought I’d take this opportunity to address them.

Why no PS3 version?

It just doesn’t make economic sense. From talking to other developers, it’s obvious that sales on current generation systems (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii) are dropping fast as people start to lose interest in the older systems and turn their attention to the newer ones. If our game was almost done or we had prior experience working on the PS3, it’d be a different story, but we don’t. A new digitally distributed game coming out in the second half of 2014 is unlikely to do well on the PS3 but more importantly, it makes no sense whatsoever to try to release any followups on the PS3 since the system is likely to be completely dead in 2015 or 2016. The PS3 is a dead end. Conversely, if Cosmic Star Heroine does well on the PS4 & Vita, those systems ought to last long enough that we can use our knowledge of developing for them to release additional games on those platforms before those platforms are replaced with even newer platforms.

If you’re using Unity, why not release it on everything?

If only it was that easy. Unity makes it easier to release on multiple platforms but there’s still work involved. For example, porting a PC game to mobile can involve extensive work as you often need to completely redo the user interface & text (smaller screen size), the controls (touch vs. keyboard/mouse/controller), and possibly do extensive optimization work for things like less RAM. And porting a game to a new console involves a whole set of possible issues – you need to work out the contracts between the developer & platform holder, you have to make sure that your game fulfills all of the platform-specific rules that the platform holder has in place, etc. And then once the game is running on a new platform, you still need to extensively test that particular version to make sure that there aren’t any platform-specific bugs that need to be fixed.

Early on, we decided that in addition to our “home base” of PC, we wanted to add a console & a portable option. We chose the PS4 & Vita for a number of reasons such as…

The Vita’s my favorite portable system & in every generation since the PS1, the Playstation console has ended up being my favorite console (since it usually ends up getting more RPGs than the other home consoles).
People at Sony have been actively talking to us & trying to get our games on their systems since mid-2012. Nintendo & Microsoft have mostly been ignoring us.
The deal that Sony offered us was very favorable and still allowed us to release at the same time on non-consoles (PC, Mac, Steam, etc.) so we’re not abandoning our fans on the PC (and judging from our recent XBLIG sales, most of our Xbox fans have already jumped to PC).
Our primary Sony contact, Shane Bettenhausen, is awesome, loves JRPGs, and really appreciates what we’re trying to do here (huge Phantasy Star fan).

There is still a possibility that we’ll decide to port Cosmic Star Heroine to other platforms in 2015 but we really felt like trying to release on day 1 on PC, Mac, PS4, and Vita was all the stress we could personally handle at one time.

If Sony is so supportive, why are you still doing kickstarter?

We’ve been planning on doing a kickstarter for this game for months and we all decided that it would be best to just go along with our original plan. And if by some wildly unlikely circumstances, we managed to talk Sony into fully funding Cosmic Star Heroine (which I think is unlikely since when you get down to it, we are still a fairly niche small indie team), such funding probably wouldn’t have come without strings attached. They would own the IP (whoever funds the game gets the IP is how things usually work), we would have to spend a lot more time justifying any design decisions to their financial teams (who care about the bottom line more than quality or originality), launching on PC simultaneously would be impossible, and ports in general would be much more difficult. It felt like we would probably have to make too many sacrifices for it to be worth it so we’ll just do a kickstarter later this month and hope for the best. Sony is helping us out in many ways while still respecting our autonomy so I’m very pleased with our current arrangement.

Why is Sony focusing so much on indie developers? They should get more AAA games!

Sony getting more indie developers doesn’t hurt their ability ability to get more AAA games; it just means that they get more games period. Your typical AAA game could easily cost tens of millions of dollars whereas your typical indie developer is working on a shoestring budget and so even a small bit of help (like a free dev kit or some extra marketing) can be a HUGE aid. I wouldn’t be surprised if all of Sony’s recent indie outreach efforts to-date have cost them far less than funding a single additional AAA game would have cost & they’ve gotten so much more out of it (dozens of indie games with more on the way plus a lot of good publicity).

Why isn’t your teaser trailer more authentic?

There’s a small purist group that occasionally get annoyed at us because our visuals aren’t authentic enough for 16-bit era or we’re not using chiptunes for our music. I think it’s important to realize that our end goal is not and never has been to make authentic retro games. Our goal is to make fun & enjoyable games without going over budget and we use elements of retro games when they help us reach that goal. So for example, we tend to not be sticklers on using the exact same color palette that certain 16-bit systems used or we might go ahead and use effects that weren’t common back then. Likewise, we don’t have unlimited funds or time so like with the teaser trailer, if we had an extra month or two we could have added some new scenes & improved some rough spots, but eventually, you need to say “This is good enough” and start working on other things.

I think the teaser trailer did a good job teasing the game world & some of the characters while being reminiscent of the Sega CD era so mission accomplished as far as I’m concerned! 🙂

Why no gameplay footage?

Because we thought it would be a fun change of pace to make an animated opener to stick in the game before the title screen! Plus it was really fun to work on something with our friend & fellow indie developer, Dean Dodrill (Dust: An Elysian Tail). We will be sharing gameplay visuals this month so at least you won’t have to wait long. We also shared some in-game visuals of the current playable characters in the Playstation Blog article last week and you should be able to glean some gameplay info from the teaser trailer (like the fact that one of your playable characters has the ability to summon & control guns with her mind powers). And in any case, we’ve already released 4 games at a relatively quick rate (and the two most recent ones are even currently on sale on Steam if you want to check them out) AND we’ve posted several articles on our site discussing Cosmic Star Heroine’s gameplay so you should be able to get a ballpark idea of the gameplay even now. But you won’t have to wait long for more information.

Have more questions? Feel free to ask them in the comments!