Getting Tactical With Pierre Leclerc, Creator of Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark
By: Bryan Finck
Tags: Gaming, Product Management, Interview, Startup, Videogames

SUPERJUMP

You used Kickstarter to help fund the game, where you were very specific in saying that the game would get made no matter how much money was raised through that campaign. Was that your way of addressing the perception that a lot of projects on that platform don’t ever get made or don’t deliver on their promises, and do you think it helped your campaign be more successful?

PIERRE LeCLERC

Our policy is always to be as transparent as possible, so we try to make things as direct as we can. Kickstarter is a great platform and it helps a lot with visibility and credibility, amongst other things. As I mentioned before, we spent many years preparing for Fell Seal by building up our savings so we always felt confident we would get the game finished one way or another, even if our Kickstarter didn’t pan out. But a successful Kickstarter helped us make sure we could get all the art we wanted and gave us a solid visibility boost and gave us a presence with many sites that otherwise wouldn’t have covered our project. The bottom line is that we mainly wanted to be upfront with backers: their contribution was very important and would help us a lot, but at the same time, the project was going to finish regardless.

I can’t say if it helped or not with our Kickstarter being successful: it’s a complex environment with a lot of variables. I can say we learned a lot from it though and we think our next Kickstarter should be even more successful! 😊

SUPERJUMP

As a follow-up to that, now that you’ve gone through a Kickstarter campaign, would you recommend it to small game studios looking to fund their projects, and are there any pitfalls a first-timer might watch out for?

PIERRE LeCLERC

That’s a good question that I think anyone wanted to make a project on Kickstarter should actually ask themselves. A serious Kickstarter is a lot of work. You have to create the page, create a ton of assets for it, videos, GIFs, screenshots, texts, tiers, etc. But that’s just the start. Once the KS is live, you have to stay active in the comments, prepare cross promotions, advertise it in reddit threads, forums, etc, and all these places require you to be very active in those threads, otherwise they will die out quickly. The bottom line is: it’s very close to full-time work for a month for a single person.

Regardless of the size/amount of the KS, I’d say you’ll need to put in that month of work if you’re serious about it, so you have to make sure the amount of money you’re hoping to get makes sense for the amount of time spent on the KS.

I’m not sure about pitfalls specifically. It’s mostly about making sure you do all you can to get your project out there. One tip I can mention is to not be shy about contacting other indie devs and even big studios. Our Kickstarter got some visibility by the very awesome folks at inXile and Obsidian Studio for example.

From my experience, small indie devs are usually very happy to help other indie devs and large studios with an indie style (or that use crowdfunding themselves) are also very friendly. Conversely, other large studios and very successful indie devs are extremely unlikely to ever respond to you. Still, you never know until you ask. 😊

SUPERJUMP

One of the hot topics among our readers is the various game engines and design platforms available to devs, and how each one fits certain game styles. Could you share which game engine you used to create Fell Seal, and why you chose it?

PIERRE LeCLERC

Before Fell Seal, my own background was mostly in C, CPP and ASM (author’s note: ASM is Assembly language) and while I absolutely love making all my own libraries from scratch, I had done so in Black Sigil and the project ended up taking a very long time. For Fell Seal, I wanted to make sure the project would be much faster, so a “ready engine” was wanted from the start.

We used Unity for Fell Seal. Mainly, I had used Unity in previous jobs and they released their new “2D Sprite system” roughly when we were planning Fell Seal, so I picked it up to “run some tests”. My tests quickly became some tools for our artist and then an engine for Fell Seal, so we went from there.

There are pros and cons to Unity, but from what I know of alternatives and what I’ve seen of Unity, I’m happy with our choice and I wouldn’t change it. As a personal suggestion though: if you’re a programmer, you should probably use Unity as a programmer would, rather than as a designer/artist would. Unity’s recommended ways of things and all of their framework is very targeted to designers/artists rather than programmers. Doing things that way makes for code that is less reusable and less robust than regular C# code would be (in my opinion, at least).

SUPERJUMP

One of the things that has been lauded by reviewers is the plethora of difficulty settings you built into the game. Why was it important for you to offer such a granular set of options and sliders? Did it have a major impact on development in terms of time and resources?

PIERRE LeCLERC

When we were designing the difficulty system, we quickly ended up with many granular settings that we wanted to be able to tune. You can see the whole game is designed that way, especially if you get into modding and want to change the game’s behavior. We have that large option text file where you can change hundreds of values one by one if you want to.

Under the hood, all the difficulty settings were going to be granular anyways, so we decided to give the player the option to change them “1 by 1”, as well as with a global predefined way for ease of use. Adding the difficulty settings in itself took time and resources for sure, but I don’t think making them more granular impacted that in any meaningful way.