The Messenger’s developer takes on the JRPG titans
I believe a good JRPG can be one of the cosiest experiences in gaming, and after playing the demo for Sea of Stars, I felt transported – Ratatouille style – back to my childhood playing on the Super Nintendo. I spoke to developer Sabotage about how it captured the spirit of the ’90s classics so well.
French indie outfit Sabotage doesn’t have a long, illustrious track record. Its first game, the The Messenger, was great, but still a far cry from a grand globe-trotting fantasy adventure like Sea of Stars. And yet, it’s swinging for the fences with its second title, invoking some heavyweight classics in the genre and aiming to exceed them. From the short slice of the game I’ve played so far (a demo still available on Steam), I think it might be able to pull it off.
I roped in Thierry Boulanger (creative director and writer) and Michael ‘Miko’ Lavoie (environment artist) from Sabotage to walk me through some of the process that has gone into making this highly promising game. Unsurprising given the leap in graphical fidelity from The Messenger to Sea of Stars, but manpower was key.
“The Messenger’s dev team was seven people. This time it’s around 26. The plan with The Messenger was that if it works, we get to make ‘The RPG’. It was a good bootstrap project for the company. Smaller scope, less risk and an easy sell. It feels like it all happened in the proper order of things,” says Thierry.
EVERY ATTACK – ENEMY OR ALLIED – HAS ITS OWN TIMING TO MEMORISE
NOSTALGIA TRIP
While the demo skips on narrative introductions, jumping straight into an early town and dungeon, it wears its inspirations clear and proud on its sleeve. Anyone familiar with the two Squaresoft SNES-era classics Chrono Trigger (now on PC) and Super Mario RPG (being remade for Switch) will feel immediately at home, with elements of both clearly apparent.
From the look of the overworld (with its adorable shrunk-down character sprites) to the flow of its dungeons, with real-time exploration segueing seamlessly into turn-based combat, it’s an immediate hit of nostalgia. Like my childhood memories of Chrono Trigger, but more, with exceptionally detailed environment art, smoother animated sprites and some very fetching lighting effects. Miko had a few things to say about the process of designing those environments, and how much time and effort it too. “I’m the main level artist on this project. It’s hard to say how long it takes to make one of these environments, but we had really good tools to work with so it was kind of a breeze, actually.”
“There’s very little friction, producing the assets. It’s still all on a grid, and the one thing we’r
