Getting Tactical With Pierre Leclerc, Creator of Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark

The staff here at SUPERJUMP are constantly working to bring you the best game developer interviews, and to that end, I’ve been privileged to correspond with Pierre LeClerc these last few weeks. Pierre and his wife Christina founded 6 Eyes Studio in 2015 after working many years in the industry.

The duo had a dream of creating an ode to the classic tactical RPGs of earlier years, so they struck out on their own and worked diligently on Fell Seal until its full release in April of 2019. They continued their work with the Missions and Monsters expansion that was released just over a year later. Both game and expansion have received rave reviews from critics and fans alike, as they deliver a heaping dose of nostalgia with a truly modern veneer.

Join us as Pierre offers a behind the scenes look at the game’s development, and learn more about how an indie studio creates and brings a game to market!

SUPERJUMP
First, I wanted to congratulate you on the release and success of Fell Seal as well as the Missions and Monsters expansion. How has the reception from games media and fans matched up to your hopes and expectations?

PIERRE LeCLERC
Thanks! It’s a little hard to say, as we didn’t have any clear expectations. We worked on Fell Seal with the goal to make it the best game of its genre as we could as our primary goal. We were certainly hoping it would result in a good reception, but the goal was to make a great game before all: a positive reception is a secondary effect. That being said, we’ve been very happy with the reception we’ve gotten, both from fans and review sites.

SUPERJUMP
So many of our readers are people either in the industry in some way, or those who want to make themselves a career in game creation. Can you tell us a bit about what your path was like, how you got started working on games, and how it led to the creation of 6-Eyes Studio?

PIERRE LeCLERC
It’s actually a bit of a longer story than one would expect, but I’ll focus on the salient points, haha. I’ve been wanting to be a video game programmer ever since I was about 14. That’s when I got my first computer and shortly after started teaching myself programming. By the time I was 18, I had a few small games created and by the time I finished college, I was working on an indie RPG for the Nintendo DS called Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled. With my portfolio of game projects on PC, GBA, and Nintendo DS, I got a job out of college for an Activision Studio in California, where I worked for 1 year at the same time I was working on Black Sigil with an artist friend.

After a year of full-time employment in the industry at the same time as working on our own indie game, it became obvious it would take too long to finish the indie project, so I left my job to wrap up Black Sigil. It still took very long, but we finished the game and got it released on the Nintendo DS with a publisher.

From there, we started a small studio working on Black Sigil 2 with an angel investor, but after a while, it became obvious our publisher for Black Sigil was not intending to actually pay us any royalties on the game. Long story short: we didn’t have the resources to look at legal options and had to close the studio, but not before I used all of my savings to pay all our employees' salaries, which left me completely broke and thus I had to quickly find work for larger studios again. I worked for a while as a contractor and in studios back in Montreal, then signed up with EA in Florida and worked there for a few years. But the long-term goal was still to have our own studio, so my wife and I started planning Fell Seal and building up some savings so we could afford to work on Fell Seal full time.

Eventually, I ran into a problem with my Canadian passport expiring in the middle of my US work visa, while my green card application was pending, which became a total mess and meant I couldn’t work anymore until my green card application finished, so we took this opportunity to go full time on Fell Seal. From that point, we worked a little over 2 years and a half full time on Fell Seal, had a successful Kickstarter, a successful Steam Early Access, and then a successful release.

SUPERJUMP
Nearly every person who talks about the game discusses how much they loved Final Fantasy Tactics and how so many things in this game remind them of that experience. Was Fell Seal intentionally a love letter to that game and the Tactics series? What other inspirations played a part in what you imagined for your game?

PIERRE LeCLERC
Absolutely. While we drew inspiration from many great classics one way or another, our primary goal was always to create an experience as reminiscent as possible to Final Fantasy Tactics, as we always thought it was “the king of tactical JRPGs”. It’s a little hard to say where all our inspiration came from, and I’m sure some of it unconsciously came from many other titles, but we drew inspiration from Tactics Ogre, Final Fantasy 6, Xcom, Dragon Age Inquisition, and probably many more.

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.

SUPERJUMP
You list on your website the people who helped on the game. I’m curious how small dev teams find artists, sound designers, etc that you bring in to help with certain aspects of the game. Are you posting on job boards, or do you have people you call on from your prior stops in the industry?

PIERRE LeCLERC
It’s a bit of everything. Our music composer worked on Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled a long time ago, so I checked with him first, since we were very happy with his music on Black Sigil. Most of the artists were found through forums and websites. Some through a job posting, some by finding their resume. Some were recommended by other indie devs we talk to. I don’t think there’s a magical recipe for that one and it’ll keep on being a big part of every project to find the right people to help on it.

SUPERJUMP
I always wonder how a small team handles testing of their games, particularly one so complex and with all the variables yours has. What was your process like for making sure the game was ready to release?

PIERRE LeCLERC
For the most part, this is the main reason we went with an Early Access and with “Beta Tiers” on our Kickstarter: a large number of players are happy to play a game before it’s finished, to help the devs clean up issues and to get a chance to submit feedback when it’s the most likely to be impactful.

The bulk of our testing was done that way. From the EA players and our Discord, we also formed a small “testing crew” unit, which helped us test more specific features and balance.

There are pros and cons to an Early Access, but personally, I think a lot of devs could benefit from one, if only for the robust testing and feedback it brings. The amount of indie games I’ve seen that release with tons of bugs and instant (and often obvious) negative feedback about some UI/design elements is shocking. Most of that would have probably been avoided with an EA (or at least a large-scale beta testing phase).

SUPERJUMP
The game was published by 1C Entertainment. I think this is another aspect of game development that may be a mystery to many of our readers, so I’m wondering a bit of what is involved in finding and working with a publisher to take your game to market.

PIERRE LeCLERC
I certainly wouldn’t say I’m an expert on that front. So far, we’ve been very happy working with 1C though. Many devs want a publisher to help them shoulder the cost of the dev cycle, but between our savings and our KS, we never needed that, so we never actively looked for a publisher. Instead, publishers approached us after seeing the game on Kickstarter or our Steam page, etc.

We were interested to work with a publisher mainly for the marketing, PR, and distribution aspect. It’s not something we have experience with and I know it’s crucial to the whole process. For us, signing with a publisher was mainly a means of reducing the chances of “the whole thing not getting any visibility at all because we didn’t know what we were doing with PR, etc.” happening. Our publisher ended up also helping with videos, localizations, QA, VO, and consoles, amongst many other things though.

I think many devs think their job is finished when they make the last art asset and compile the final build of their game. They have this idea of “build it and they will come”, but that’s very far from how things work. Making sure the game is visible to players is a huge deal and that’s an area where publishers have a lot more experience than most devs. That being said, it’s all about your resources and what your team excels at. If you have the funds to finish the project and you think you have experts that can handle the PR, marketing, launch visibility, perhaps you don’t need a publisher.

SUPERJUMP
You did what seems to be an incredibly ambitious thing with Fell Seal’s release, putting it out on four platforms (Steam and GOG, plus Xbox and PS4) at the same time. Add to that you had it localised in five different languages at the time of release. Was there a particular reason you did that, when many other studios opt for staggered releases on the various platforms?

PIERRE LeCLERC
Our publisher told us it would be a stronger release that way, so we just went for it honestly. With Unity, it was very simple to create a build for consoles and the game was designed with a controller in mind, so there were no major hurdles with console versions.

SUPERJUMP
With the Missions and Monsters DLC finished, what’s up next for the studio? Will you stay with the tactical RPG genre or explore something else altogether?

PIERRE LeCLERC
We’re still planning our next move. At this point, we’re leaning towards a new project. It’ll still be an RPG, most likely turn-based, and probably some form of strategy game. But we’re still planning. 😊

SUPERJUMP
Thank you very much Pierre for making time to do this interview with us. Best of luck on your future projects!

PIERRE LeCLERC
Thanks a lot for checking our game everyone! 😊