Unless you're a die-hard RPG fan, you might not have heard of Godforge yet - but you will soon. It's Fateless' project, a studio made up of ex-developers from the likes of Riot Games, Epic, and Amazon. 100k people played Godforge's beta test back in May, making it astonishingly popular for a mostly independent project, and in its wake, I got a chance to talk to studio co-founder Simon Lockerby.
Lockerby and I discussed what it was like to go from YouTube to a games studio, how Godforge has been so successful, and his approach to AI and staffing. He'll even give you some advice in case you're starting your own games studio. Are you ready?
Let's talk about Godforge first. Anyone out there who hasn't heard of it, how would you describe the game?
Godforge is a turn-based RPG, based on gods, myths, and legends from initially nine different mythologies. We're bringing a big community along with a genre of game which they love, pushing it further from a social and community aspect than what we've seen in this genre before.
For us, it's very much about staying true to the turn-based hero collector genre, but really trying to make sure that any feature we build has a real lean towards community, social aspects, and interactivity that we used to love from games like MMOs in the past. Certainly all of the founders used to play a lot of World of Warcraft and big MMOs, and most of us basically aged up and don't have time for that anymore, so it's like 'how do we try and bring some of that to life in a mobile game?'
It seems like people are loving it - testing's gone really well with 100k signups. That must be massively exciting for you guys, so what's been the strategy in terms of getting the word out there? How are you responding to player feedback?
For the last six years, I've been doing YouTube, covering Raid Shadow Legends. I was able to build a big community of players that really enjoyed my content, and really trusted me and the brand that I'd built around me. It was that community that said, 'Why don't you create your own games? We really trust you'. So we've used that as our base, and then we've been very open in the way we developed the game, starting to build a YouTube community, and we built a Discord around that as well.
We thought we'd do a few tests quite early, so we did an Alpha period where we invited about 35,000 players in. They came and tested the game and gave us a ton of feedback, and then we've really done the same again recently in our beta - we had about 100,000 players in for the beta over a ten-day period of playtesting.
We asked [players] 'What sort of features would you love to see? What sort of things do you love about other games? What do you not like about other games?' And we tried to craft something that fits what our community wants, while still trying to make sure that it works as a game. It still has to have the fundamentals of being a decent amount of grind and fun.
Yeah, absolutely. So Godforge is coming to mobile, among other platforms. Why was it important for you to provide a multi-platform experience?
We're very much a mobile-first studio. Everything we design for Godforge is made with the view that it needs to be optimized for mobile and perform really well on mobile. However, we know that our player base likes to also play on their PCs, so it was about allowing that, too.
Our demographic of players is probably slightly older than a lot of mobile games - it's more like [ages] 30 to 60. That type of player is going off to work, and they've got responsibilities, so being able to play on mobile is really important. And actually, if they do have some time, they still want to go back to their PC and basically relive the glory days. They might want to log onto their PC on a Saturday or Sunday and do a four- or five-hour play session and feel like they're in that immersive world. So for us, it was really important out of the gate to be able to offer both.
Cool, nice. What responses are you hoping for from your players, and what do you want to do for them, aside from being a throwback to the World of Warcraft days?
It's all about exciting moments. It's about re-finding the fun in this type of genre. We were heavily influenced not just by games like World of Warcraft, but also some of the older Final Fantasy series. It's like having mini games within a game that can also just bring your world to life. It brought me to these exciting byproduct moments.
When we're building out a campaign, for example, we want there to be a certain agency for the player to make choices. We want there to be some exciting moments where they might unlock a certain area and find a boss that takes them to a new part of the world. So for us, it's very much about exciting moments with narrative, storytelling, and world-building. Then obviously making sure that when we have things like Pantheons, which is our guild system, that actually there are different areas where you interact together to become stronger.
That sounds great. And what is Godforge doing for you as a studio? This is your first game. What's the plan with the studio?
We really want to have hundreds of thousands, or millions, of players coming in and enjoying the game on a daily basis. We want people to talk about Godforge and say, 'Wow, that's a really cool game'. That's pretty much top of the list. The dream is that people are talking to their friends and encouraging them to come and play.
Building the IP of Godforge, the world that we're building here, is really important as well, so if we look to do a second or a third game, it's about 'how do we utilize this world that we're building in other genres which are still in the RPG world?' For example, we really like TGCs, and anything MMO - those types of games where it's still strategy, it's still deep thought - but really using the world that we've got here to bring it to life.
It's also about building a team of great talent. We want to build a game where really talented people in the industry want to come and work for us because we've got a great reputation - it's super important to us.
Yeah, definitely. I think, given how expansive it is, in terms of its lore and the depth of it, you have a lot of room to play around with it.
Yeah, we're definitely trying to take inspiration from some of the games in this space, which have been released in the Eastern markets. You know, it's games like Honkai or Genshin [Impact], where they really try and encourage a much wider group of players - players play for different reasons. Some just really get engaged with the story and the lore, and we've got a brilliant writer, Aaron [de Orive], who's just giving us a different flavor to what people have seen in this space in the Western markets.
Collaboration is pretty important to the studio, then. What was it like when you guys first decided to start a studio together?
It was super fun, actually. At that point, I'd been doing content for about three years, and there were a number of times where I got a load of messages saying 'why don't you create your own games? We really like what you stand for and your taste in the space'. There was actually a meeting with one of our co-founders, Dan [Francis], where I told him that my community was asking again if we'll create our own game. A few times, we sort of brought it up, and that time, no one really laughed it off. I was like, 'I don't know why we're not doing this. Like this is literally our dream to do'.
We'd already been developing a lot of tools for people that were playing games in this space, so it was the next natural progression. And actually Sham [Saleh], who's our third co-founder, had his own indie studio for a number of years, so he's worn all the hats on a smaller scale and understood a lot about the industry. And it was really the three of us who decided 'right, we can do this, but we need to build a great foundation, a great team around us'.
[When hiring] I think we got scrappy, really. We went to places like GDC and Gamescom, and we started to talk to a lot of people in the industry, connecting with them really well. They really liked the idea of this game made by gamers with a big community behind it. We're able to recruit just fantastic talent, and that's really been the lifeblood of what we've done.
We've recruited almost 100% through recommendation, instead of a traditional recruiter, and that's been brilliant for us. Being fully remote, we're able to just recruit based on people's passion, their talent, and their knowledge of the space or adjacent spaces. It's just grown and grown. We've probably grown by one to two people every month for the last two years, so it's been like a nice, steady pace.
Yeah, I think in this time of widespread layoffs, there are lots of talented people who are just being left behind.
Yeah, which is a real shame, in terms of the way the industry has gone for some other studios in the last two years or so, but it has created opportunity for us. It means that we've been able to get people from really some of the biggest studios that exist, and they've come with great knowledge.
On top of that, we've also worked really well with Howest in Belgium, a university that specializes in gaming. We've worked with them on an intern program, taking seven interns from them over the last three years, who are now full-time employees. We've had this good blend of new blood in the industry that are finding their feet - they have fresh ideas and fresh ways of thinking. Paired alongside these veterans who have been there and shipped a lot of games, the crossover has been really good.
I'm quite relieved as a young person myself to hear you say that you've been hiring new people as well, because I think it gives emerging game devs the opportunity to learn from the best. And there aren't many windows like that anymore.
I mean, definitely. It's actually what's really cool about the internship - it's even more diverse. Probably 50% of our interns have been female, and we've always just recruited based on the quality of the candidate. The first year [at Howest], we probably spoke to about 25 students. Last year, we switched to over 100, because they know that Fateless actually employs people.
This is all related to my next question about the struggles of the industry. What is your approach to game development in this time of uncertain future? Obviously, nothing's ever promised anymore. So what's the studio's take on this?
I think as founders we're super aware of our burn rate and how much runway we've got in terms of time to be able to generate some cash or gain more capital. I actually worked really closely with our initial investors - I haven't really spoken about this - but for our seed funding, I put our video on my YouTube channel saying: we're doing it, Fateless is born, we're doing what you wanted us to do, and I laid out the plan of what we wanted to do with the studio.
We had over 100 inbound emails from angel investors from within the community, which eventually formed our seed of $6 million. It was a crazy way to raise our first capital, and was never the intention, honestly, but it turned out to be brilliant, because you've got people that are really invested, engaged as a shareholder group. We actually did the same thing again with our second round.
But it's very much about being very transparent, open, and honest with that group around where we are, what we're trying to do, and when we're trying to do it by. We're also trying to make sure that we use as many tools as we can to be efficient, making sure that we're making use of these veterans who are not just coming in as leaders, leading people, but are very much under the hood, creating content and actually loving it. They love being back in the mix of creating art, or coding themselves, or doing all those things that they came into the industry to do.
You mentioned using tools efficiently. It's hard to ignore what's happening with AI these days. What is your sort of company's stance on it? Are you planning to put your fingers in that pie, too?
I think it's crazy not to have fingers in the pie in some sense right now. We definitely have workflows which speed up our development, things like agents that are able to do bug fixing whilst we sleep. We're using platforms just to enhance efficiency. We definitely have our designers, who will put some of our hero designs into an AI program to start off, and they'll look at, 'Hey, do we have enough healers? Do we have enough tanks? Tools like that are actually super intuitive - they save a ton of time, and even some of our artists are now starting to look at what about utilizing AI tools to improve some of our mesh work.
What we won't do is have character art in the game that is AI-generated. Concepting 3D models, world building - all that type of stuff is very much with a specialist, and that's our stance on it.
And that comes from a belief that the human product is better or should be valued?
I think it should be valued. I think the best use of AI right now is for someone who's really skilled in a craft to use AI to basically enhance their workflows. We had an opportunity actually to do AI voicing, for example, for some of our characters. It would have saved us a lot of time and actually a lot of cash, but we just preferred the authentic performance that we got from people. Our narrative director was really passionate about this. He definitely did notice a difference, and he was like, 'No, that's not for us. ' I'm not saying we don't try things, but certainly when it comes down to our leaders, we make sure that they do get a big voice in this and we respect that.
Thank you. That was very insightful. On a slightly different note, do you have any advice for people who are trying to sort of set up their own game studio or make games themselves?
That's a tough question, actually. It's much tougher than I ever thought it was going to be, and we needed a much bigger team than I thought we were going to need to be able to build a game to the level that we're trying to do. Some advice I've been given since then was to make sure that you start with smaller projects and build up to that big one, so that you almost cut your teeth on a much faster-to-produce game.
I would definitely say: prototype and iterate really fast, really early. Don't try to get to a finished visual, don't try to get to a finished layout - literally wireframe and playtest, and see if you found the fun, before you start spending a lot of dollars and a lot of time on trying to create the final piece. And the other thing that I would definitely say is that networking is so powerful in this space. In this space, everyone collaborates really well, and everyone just wants to see cool games being made, so sharing your vision and sharing your prototypes while getting feedback by working with other people in the industry is brilliant, and it's gone a long way for us. Get to some of the in-person events.
Thank you. Okay, finally, could you give me a one-sentence pitch as to why a reader right now should sign up for Godforge?
Godforge is fresh, it's community-first, and we're really trying to disrupt the squad RPG genre with something which is lore-heavy and really fun.
Thanks, Simon!
Godforge is open for pre-registration now via the website. Let us know if you have any thoughts about the interview over on the Pocket Tactics Discord server!