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You can watch the full hour-long stream above, in which Fool's Theory project lead Jakub Rokosz and world and story designer Karolina Kuzia-Rokosz join us to discuss the game's technical achievements, as well as its design and story conceits as well.
To help other developers better understand how the game works, and what challenges the team faced in creating an isometric stealth RPG in which the character can shimmy off balconies or scale cliffs, we've transcribed some useful parts of that conversation below.
Stream Participants:
Bryant Francis, Editor at Gamasutra
Alex Wawro, Editor at Gamasutra
Jakub Rokosz, Project lead of Seven: The Days Long Gone at Fool's Theory
Karolina Kuzia-Rokosz, World and story designer of Seven: The Days Long Gone at Fool's Theory
Indie production insight
Wawro: It seems ambitious for a small team to jump right into games with a sort of traditional asymmetric-esque CRPG; this seems like a lot to tackle, although obviously your experiences with CD Projekt informs your work on this, I'm sure. Why did this particular project seem like such a good idea for you, your first time out?
Kuzia-Rokosz: If you think about it from the practical side, [the gap between some big ideas and what we can do is large]. So, first of all, we have a small team so first-person is really out of our reach for now, for such a small team. On the other hand, we still wanted to make something innovative, so like an isometric RPG or other game seemed like a good way to start.
Rokosz: It's a good way to start, I was thinking at length about it, about what we should do for our first project, and I always loved and wanted to do an RPG. What happened was, I started calculating how many people you needed for the back end, to do stuff of the proper quality level. It turned out that I don't have that much money, and I don't know anyone who does! (laughs)
So we could either crunch like crazy, or we could have only seniors in our team and crunch like crazy, or we would have to do something different, in a different approach. So we decided on an isometric point of view, not just because it was easier -- it wasn't actually easier because we had the other problems with the camera and perspective and combat, etc. -- but it kind of took some problems out of our way at the start, so we didn't need any people in the cinematic department, so we didn't have to do film-esque cutscenes, or facial animations, or rigging all the fingers and stuff. That takes some workload off of our animators and stuff.
So it's definitely easier to do this kind of game in a smaller team. The other thing was that, when we were doing Seven, it turned out we knew that we were going to need people who were multi-instrumentalists, so they could do anything and everything. So oftentimes it would be one person in our team would do three or four departments at the same time and juggle tasks.
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