Tony Yang, the former lead software engineer at Studio Atma, talks about Gravastar, their upcoming sci-fi JRPG, one thing about being an indie developer he would like people to know about, and the value of having a local indie dev community to go to for support and feedback. (Interview over Skype from October 2016)

By Tyler Cummings







GrandLethal16: Would you like to introduce yourself?

Tony Hi, I’m Tony Yang and I am working on the game Gravastar by Studio Atma.

GrandLethal16: Tell me about Gravastar.

Tony: Gravastar is basically a JRPG that contains the aesthetic of a JRPG and the unique epic storyline of a JRPG with a bit of fighting game mechanics. You have timed elements in the game where you have to input combos and complete button presses to unleash special attacks. It’s set on the world Aethera and you’re playing as Baird, who has just discovered he’s a Spectre and we can’t say why because that will spoil the game, but basically he finds out that he’s a rare being that has power tied to the stars that soar over the skies. He needs to basically journey on a quest with his friends to prevent that power from being used for evil. So you know, nothing too crazy in the JRPG scale.

GrandLethal16: What inspired you to make Gravastar?

Tony: Essentially, we were playing a bunch of newer JRPGs and a trend of game design. I guess that in order get all the people’s money, they streamlined JRPGs a bit - it’s basically become “Press A to win”. When we were little kids, we were playing all these games, like Chrono Trigger or Secret of Mana, the older Final Fantasies and Xenogears - that sort of stuff - where you were more involved and you actually felt like you were part of a story rather than part of just a timeline to get things done. We wanted to bring that back to our gamers, so they could have this grand tale that they were a part of.

GrandLethal16: What part of making Gravastar did you enjoy working on?

All the active elements that are in a game that kind of speaks to Secret of Mana and Xenogears, where rather than “Select ‘Attack’ and then select a ‘Target’ ”, you just select an attack and you select a target, but now you have the chance to do fight move combos where you, “Jab-Jab, do an Uppercut” and knock them into the air. That sort of stuff. We wanted to implement that into the game as well.

GrandLethal16: Optimization of moves based on remaining time bar?

Yes exactly. Exactly. If you have some of your longer attacks, you want to wait until the end of the attack phase so that you can get all the attacks in.

GrandLethal16: What part of making Gravastar took longer than you expected?

All of it so far! But honestly, all we’ve done so far is just the battle system, and I think the greatest moment was at the beginning. We were just picking up unity and we hadn’t - none of us - had used it before and we were asking each other, “How do we just get a guy to just move around on the screen in animation” and once we had our first little section where we just had a goo that’s not even animating and our guy - he’s barely drawn in and he just moves over and does an attack on the goo, that was the best moment. We were like, “Yeah, we’re actually making the game now!”.

GrandLethal16: What are the biggest challenges you’re facing as you develop your game?

So, none of us had experience shipping a full title before. Well, that’s not true. One of us did, but basically, we’re just trying to get the timelines down, figuring out what other work was gonna be needed to be done by when, and how long did it take to get just a battle system going. That’s taking a little bit longer than we expected, but it’s been relatively “on schedule.” We are at least experienced in our own specialties: programming or arts. One of the other things is learning how to balance feature work versus polish for conventions. Getting out to a convention, trying to do a convention every month - that sounds great and all and that’s good for marketing and getting people to come and see your game, but that also means that you’re not leaving yourself a lot of time to work on the larger features you need to get done. We’re working on an overworld now so we’re actually gonna take a good six months break from showing at conventions to get the overworld out and that way we have something bigger to show to everybody the next time we’re at a show.

GrandLethal16: What’s the craziest gameplay moment you’ve seen in Gravastar, either when you or someone else was playing?

One of the craziest things I’ve seen? So internally, we test out the game and we have competitions to see who can get the longest combo off of a single attack. There’s an attack we call the Spiral Vortex, where you basically go up and do a special attack and have to mash the A button repeatedly to get the attack out to hit more and do more damage. We would be like, “I got 12.” That’s wasn’t bad, but then this guy comes up and he’s clearly played fighting games before and he gets up to 19 and we’re just saying, “What in the heck. How do you even get to 19? I don’t even think my fingers can move that fast”. It was pretty amazing!

GrandLethal16: Have you thought of recruiting some FGC players to playtest your battle mechanics?

You know, we really should. We figure there’s probably enough people that can get that sort of fast button mashing in there. We can bounce around those people.

GrandLethal16: How did you get into video game developing?

You know, I’ve been a gamer since I was a little kid and when you’re a gamer and you know techie stuff, you want to get into game programming. That’s what I’ve wanted to do for awhile. I took some classes in college for games and also I did some Starcraft 2 modding, but I didn’t actually start doing full-on game developing until I met up with the guys at Gravastar. Yeah, we met and talked and it just seemed like something we wanted to do!

GrandLethal16: What are the biggest challenges you faced when developing your game?

As far as storyboarding, that’s already mostly been taken care of. I’m on the programming side, so I enjoy helping out with storyboarding, but that’s not my forte. One of the biggest things we have to do is just play the game, doing all the moves and say, “Okay, this feels right.” or, “Oh, this doesn’t feel right.” and trying to figure out what sort of ideas we can implement to make the mechanics feel better. We’re constantly talking about, “How can we get the ‘juice’ in?”. The “juice” is what’s gonna draw people in and we keep asking ourselves, “How can we get the juice to the players?“. So, just constantly playtesting and re-iterating on things has just been the biggest part of making Gravastar work.

GrandLethal16: What is one thing about being an indie developer you would want people to know about?

It depends on how deep into the indie dev scene they are. One of the biggest things to know even though there are all these sorts of engines out there Unreal and Unity or whatever, there’s still a lot of work to be put into making the game. You can make an RPG Maker game and if that’s what you want, it will work for you, but if you wanted to go into depth and really make a solid game, you’re gonna need to sink a lot of time into it. One of the things that we do is we have full-time jobs to support our night-time jobs (working on Gravastar). In our experience, you have to approach it with a startup culture where you have to constantly seek funding, otherwise you’re not gonna be able to make this game. You really have a full-time job to support you until you get extra funding elsewhere.

GrandLethal16: Speaking of “extra funding”, where do you think crowdfunding fits into the indie game dev “game plan”?

It’s got it’s places. it’s great to kind of see and get an idea of what sort of appeal your game has to the market! Imagine just being able to get out there and say, "These 10,000 people backed our game, so we know we at least have 10,000 people who would play our game”, but then the opposite side of that spectrum is that if you don’t have a player base, it’s really difficult to get crowdfunding out there. One of the things that people say is, "Make sure to build your player base and really connect with them”, but if you don’t have a player base it can be tough. Then you’re gonna have your parents coming in and crowdfunding you a little bit and you’re like, “Thanks, Mom and Dad”. So, it has its place, but you also have to have some sort of critical mass of followers before you can even feasibly consider it.

GrandLethal16: What tips would you give anyone looking to independently develop their own game?

Make sure you have a lot of time, because you’re either gonna sink all of your time into the development of the game in general and put in 50-60 hour weeks, or you’re gonna have to spend a lot of your time outside of your day job to do it. An even better thing I would say is to get to know your indie game community. One of the biggest things that are helping us out right now is that we’re part of Seattle Indies group. We’re also part of the Meetup group. We’re part of this core channel of indie devs, and so everybody can do a show and tell and be like, “This is something I just made!” and everyone is really supportive with, “Oh that’s cool. What did you use for that?” or something. Definitely get to know your fellow indie devs!

GrandLethal16: Where do you see yourself in five years?

In five years? Hopefully, we’ll be shipping Gravastar around that time. In five years, I’m hoping to be drinking a pina colada on a beach somewhere, but after that, it’s kind of hard to see out past that point right now. Right now, we’re just aiming to get Gravastar out there to the fans.

GrandLethal16: How big is the Gravastar team?

There’s four of us at the core and we also have contractors that we work with to get certain elements done in our game.

GrandLethal16: What aspects of Gravastar are you currently working on?

Tony: It’s actually kind of funny because we were trying to work on our Active system would work and also how Slow and Haste would affect turns in battle and we actually went and played Final Fantasy X again because that was the inspiration for that portion of our game. We just looked at it, and it’s such a solid system that we were paying homage to it in our game.

GrandLethal16: Do you have specific games you turn to for inspiration on Gravastar’s features?

Tony: We don’t have anything specific. Whenever we’re focusing on Special Attacks, we look at the Marvel vs Capcom Hyper Combos, where your Super Meter is charged and you unleash it and there are certain flashes on the screen with overlays. So, anytime we are stumped we just look at what other games have been doing. We don’t reference any specific game, but we ask ourselves, “What do these sort of games do to complete the system?”

GrandLethal16: Undoubtedly, there’s a great library of games to draw inspiration from!

Tony: Oh yeah! It is a credit to the JRPG history that there are so many good games out there.

GrandLethal16: What are your top 3 favorite JRPGs?

Tony: I cut my teeth on the JRPG drama with Final Fantasy VII. Even though that’s not quite holding up through time, it’s still one of my favorite JRPGs. Chrono Trigger is also in there. I just loved all the branching story lines and all the endings that you could get. You weren’t necessarily the same character throughout the game. You had Chrono, but then you could play as all the other players at some point. I don’t really have a third one that kinda sits in that category. I guess Final Fantasy X is also pretty solid, but it’s just kind of whatever is playing for me right now is a favorite. I guess you could say Pokemon is a JRPG…

GrandLethal16: I think it’s definitely an RPG.

Tony: Yeah, so I remember playing Red and Blue Version. That was my shit back in the day. So those are my three, I guess - Final Fantasy VII, Chrono Trigger and Pokemon.

GrandLethal16: Do you have a website where folks can check out your work?

Tony: The biggest place to follow us would be on Twitter. If you follow us @StudioAtma, A-t-m-a. You can also check out Gravastar on our GravastarGame.com website or you can go to our Facebook page, which is StudioAtmaGames.

GrandLethal16: Thanks for taking time out of your day to sit down and chat with me!

Tony: No problem, Tyler. Thanks for having me on!





Check out more on what Tony Yang is up to these days from his Twitter page, @Tony_Dubu, or visit the Studio Atma website for the latest news on Gravastar! You can also follow Studio Atma on Twitter at @StudioAtma!

If you liked this interview, follow my Twitter page, @GrandLethal16, to keep up with upcoming content and events! I post-convention giveaways / gaming updates to Instagram and Facebook, too.

