Necro Story rose to life on the Switch a few weeks ago and utterly charmed me with its great combat, fantastic writing, and amazing gameplay. With all the fun I had with the game, I just wanted to know more, so I reached out to Pablo from Rablo Games who was kind enough to give me some insights into game development, challenges, and Necro Story.
If you’re interested in Necro Story, check out our review here – Necro Story Switch Review | What’s It Like?
or the Eshop link here – Necro Story/Nintendo Switch/eShop Download
How did the idea of Necro Story Come about?
After releasing Healer’s Quest, I wanted to do something different but still in the same vein.
I was done with the healer gameplay, so I wanted to work on a game where you should not heal your allies, but damage your opponents. I also wanted to explore the creature-collection mechanic, trying to make the collection process more gameplay-related than what we can find in many other games, and quickly came out with the soul-catching mechanic.
Your previous game, Healers Quest, was about the underappreciated healer in adventuring groups, what made you decide to move towards Necromancers?
After shipping Healer’s Quest, I wanted to go with a completely different character, world and setup. I came to the conclusion that a game featuring a necromancer would be very cool and varied, as they can do so many different things. Summoning skeletons, zombies and other undead creatures, poisoning enemies, life stealing, casting darkness spells, and I even added some extra things, like demon transformations and catching enemies’ souls to add them to your team, turning the game into a monster-collection game. The amount of spells that could be given to a necromancer was huge, and I really wanted to explore all these possibilities in this game.
Were there any influences during development that shaped the final product?
Even if it doesn’t use the same combat system, there is a lot of influence from old J-RPG from the PS One era in Necro Story. The main inspiration was Breath Of Fire III, which is a game I finished multiple times and really loved back in the day. The gems system of Necro Story comes quite directly from the masters in BOF3, and the Demon transformations were also inspired by the dragon transformations in that game, as well as from summonings in the Final Fantasy series.
Necro Story can be seen as the spiritual successor to Healer’s Quest, so the games share quite a lot of influence. On the humour standpoint, I really like the theatre play “Ubu Roi” by Alfred Jarry and the French TV show Kaamelott, in which King Arthur deals with extremely stupid Knights of the Round Table. Humour in my games definitely takes inspiration from these.
How long was the development cycle of the game?
It was very long actually. It took no less than 6 years and a half to go from the first prototype to the release. During most of these years, Baptiste and myself were working after hours, while working full-time on the side. So it explains the long development time. It’s only the very last year that we were able to work mostly full-time on it.
Were there any challenges when making Necro Story for the Switch compared to other hardware?
We had quite a hard time making the game run correctly on Switch. When we did the first tests, the Switch was struggling quite a lot. So we had to make some global optimizations that would be present on all other platforms as well. But that wasn’t enough, so we had to remove some post-process effects for the Nintendo console specifically. For example, we had to remove the night effect in some rooms of the castle at the beginning, and the red effect in the demonic towers. So definitely, we had to overcome some challenges from a performance standpoint.
The relationship between Vivi and Jaimus and their banter injects a lot of humour into the game, was this always planned to be in the game, or did that evolve as development moved forward?
I wanted to make another humorous game right from the beginning. I really enjoyed writing the story of Healer’s Quest, and was looking for something a bit in the same vein, but without the 4th wall breaking. The duo Jaimus-Vivi was one of the first things I had in mind when I started working on the game. I found it funny to have a (kind of) evil protagonist, helped by an optimistic and playful sidekick. I had plenty of explosive ideas for dialogues between these two, so I built many parts and events of the game based on the duo.
Without venturing too far into spoiler territory, I really liked how the game flashed back to where I went wrong to get the bad ending. What was the inspiration behind that and was it difficult to implement?
The base idea was to add some replayability. I think Monster-Collection games are the kind of games that are fun to play multiple times, trying to get all the creatures, or even all the items in the case of Necro Story. To encourage that, we added a higher difficulty mode (Apocalypse) that unlocks after finishing the game the first time. Along with the Hardcore and Ultra-Hardcore modes, this can bring some serious extra challenges. But I wanted to push the idea of having the player play multiple times a bit further, so we proposed different endings, based on something the player may choose or not to do in the game. The main inspiration for this is the way Undertale proposes the player to do multiple playthroughs of the game, and in our case it also made complete sense from a story standpoint.
And yes, the flashback was quite challenging to do, both from technical and narrative perspectives. When we tested it the first time, the playtester didn’t understand what was going on, so we had to work on making this part more explicit. And even a couple of weeks before the game’s release we still had bugs with the flashback scene, where there was no background. So it was definitely challenging to do. But I really wanted to have this part in the story.
Necro Story was released to a very positive reception, how did that feel?
We’re delighted to see that the players seem to have a great time playing the game! Player ratings on Steam are 96% positive and even press reception was really good, so we’re really happy about that and it motivates us to push forward onto the next projects, even if sales are sadly a bit lagging at the moment.
What advice would you have for someone with an idea for a game looking to get into the industry?
My very first advice would be to not try making a huge game as your first project. If you plan that the game will take you one year to be completed, it will probably take four. And if it should take 2 years, it will most probably never be released. So start small, with a project that you think you can finish in something like one or two months. My second advice is to just start making it now. Don’t wait for things to change, to have more time available, to meet an ace programmer or something else. You need to start doing it now, and keep your motivation high to make it happen. If you need to learn new skills in the process, don’t be afraid, that’s even more fun! If you need to learn programming, I would recommend using Construct 3. It’s very easy and fun to use. You can learn to make simple games in less than 2 hours by following a good tutorial.
If you have no skills in programming, based on my experience, I would advise to use a simplified game engine (Construct, Game Maker) and still do the programming yourself rather than trying to find someone you don’t know to code your game. That never worked for me.
Most importantly, you should enjoy every moment you are creating this game. As long as you have fun, your motivation will stay high, and nothing can stop you from finishing the game.
What’s next for Rablo Games?
We started working on a third big project that should be released around the end of 2026, but we still need to find funding for the biggest part of the production. Before that, we plan to release a very different, smaller game. It’s a side-project on which I started to work in 2015, and it will soon reach a point where it will be showable to the public. We look forward to telling you more about these projects very soon!
