We reported on Everstar last week. It has gained a bit more attention on Kickstarter than other games, thanks to some of its developers being ex-BioWare employees. It’s also left a lot of questions. Just on cue, however, developer studio Psycho Sorted held an interview with RPGamer where they touched upon some of our concerns.

Some of the replies, I found quite interesting:

What have been some of your inspirations for Everstar? Where did the game’s title come from? Did you come up with the idea for the story first or the gameplay?

Some of our inspiration comes from books like Ender’s Game and The Broken Empire series (fans of Jorg Ancrath will love some of the darker story choices in Everstar). The Persona 3 & 4 games have a school simulation format that we love and have learned a lot from. The way the old Bungie Myth series integrated physics into the gameplay is something we are building on; the co-op experience in Baldur’s Gate I&II was some of the most fun to be had in an RPG. I don’t want to give much away here, but it’s worth mentioning Neon Genesis too, for the honest psychological spiral it portrayed in its child soldiers.

The name Everstar is tied into the lore of the game world; literal fallen stars walk the land in human form and are the object of the major religions in the world. For example the Avallians worship the Morningstar; the specific meaning of the Everstar will start to become clear during the game.

Both the story and gameplay are constantly evolving beasts—we had specific ideas for the plot and game mechanics early on. In working with Everstar day to day we are constantly “listening” for the game to tell us what works and what doesn’t and sculpting the game experience into what it wants to be.

While I’m a fan of the art style, I’ve read some comments that say it looks too cartoony or generic. Why did you choose this style? Do you feel it fits the theme of game? I think it looks very impressive for a Kickstarter project, but considering many people look at graphics before diving deeper these days, do you feel like the visual style will work for you?

It’s funny—we settled on our character style because we didn’t just want to do generic photo-real-ish fantasy, so we went for a more stylized look. I guess you can’t please everyone! What we are showing in our Kickstarter is prototype art—the final art look will be quite a bit more polished and stylized. We figured this would be another risk in showing game footage that is mostly arted, but not at all polished—that people would think this is our final look. So given that one of the reasons we are doing the Kickstarter is to raise our visual bar, we think it looks pretty good too!

I have to ask about poor Frederick. Why did Yona take out the poor guy just to have the party turn around and fight the boss just a few steps later? Just to show how much Yona disliked Frederick? How does the party react to Yona if he does jerk things like that? Maybe Frederick was a jerk who was in need of a good stomping?

It’s actually much simpler than that—Yona was playing dirty to get Frederick’s Iron Spear and add a bit of space between them and the boss. Metal is extremely rare in Everstar, and keen viewers will note that Yona was using a wooden sword during that particular playthrough, so that spear is a nice upgrade. As you play through Everstar you’ll see that Frederick is actually a really good guy—and that “bait” option is for players who want to play a character who takes advantage of good people, a real sociopath. Each of the choices in that sequence has gameplay and story consequences, which is something we strive to do with most of the choices in Everstar.

If you want to donate to Everstar‘s development, you can do so via their recently kicked-off Kickstarter page.