Cosmic Star Heroine - Interview @ The Vita Lounge

The Vita Lounge interviewed Bill Stiernberg, and Robert Boyd of Zeboyd Games about their successful kickstarter RPG Cosmic Star Heroine.

Brian Sharon: First off I’d like to congratulate the both of you on a successful Kickstarter campaign for Cosmic Star Heroine. Looking back on the process, what was the experience like?

Bill Stiernberg: It was a lot more work than it seemed at first. We had been watching and studying the various successful (and unsuccessful) Kickstarters for a long time. We had many long discussions about what works and what doesn’t for a Kickstarter page, and how campaigns are run, and what pitfalls there can be. Coming up with reward tiers and adjusting them was a lot of work too; rewards that are realistic to do and ship without killing us on time and shipping and other costs, then constant tweaking before the Kickstarter launch. Building the page was tons of work, I had to create a ton of custom assets for it and try to lay it out professionally. 

We scrapped a number of things and added others, rearranged the page, and rewrote sections quite a bit. Finally, the video was somewhat challenging – we knew what we wanted to say, but explaining it well and try to be concise and not messing up on video is its own challenge! Thankfully Marc at Inlight-10 Productions did a great job recording and editing the final video. Once launch, Kickstarters remain a ton of work – you have to keep interest up and answer backer questions and tweets and so forth. Then you sit and watch the funding with a mix of excitement and stress. Our first day did super well, which took some pressure off, though, thankfully. So now we’re onto making the game, whoo!

The term JRPG was once nearly synonymous with quality, but today has fallen to become a dirty word of sorts. As fans of the genre, how do you feel about the current state of JRPG’s?

Bill Stiernberg: Well, the past several years could have been better for the genre. The HD-consoles have made it difficult to produce big-budget console JRPGs, and so you see many of the really good ones show up on the handhelds in the past few years. So they’re there, and there are many great ones. But we’d all like to see more show up on consoles and PC as well. Fortunately, it seems that more JRPG style games are showing up on digital platforms, both on consoles and PC (Steam) of late. I think going forward less “big” genres will find a lot of success that way.