Interview with Game Director and Programmer of Fallen Fates

It’s that time of year again! The Six One Indie Showcase is in full swing and that means loads of amazing indies being shown off and, of course, we’ve got more developer interviews for you. We sent some questions to Louis, the co-founder of Hibernian Workshop and game director and programmer of action RPG Fallen Fates.

A huge thank you to Louis for being a part of our September showcase and for allowing us to show off Fallen Fates.

• Can you tell me a little bit about the team behind Fallen Fates?

  We used to be a very small team on our first project Dark Devotion released on 2019, then we increased the team size during Astral Ascent released on 2023 and we are now a dozen full time partly on updating Astral Ascent which keeps getting major updates and most of the team on our new project Fallen Fates, the team learned so much during Astral Ascent development and as we self-published we learned a very large variety of skills!

• How did the idea for the game come about? Were there any notable sources of inspiration?

  Funnily Fallen Fates is the project we wanted to make back in 2019 after our first game Dark Devotion but we thought we would do “a little roguelike” game first and here we are 6 years later finally starting Fallen Fates production! It gave us time to think a lot about the project and what we would really like to explore through this game. The original idea was clearly influenced by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I immediately wanted to have this feeling of freedom and exploration in a nature oriented world. It was later heavily influenced by Final Fantasy XVI gameplay, storytelling and scenery. And the game is overall very influenced by Hyper Light Drifter, The Mageseeker: A League of Legends Story™ and Death’s Door.

• Fallen Fates seems to be shaping up into a really engaging action game with a robust story based on the Steam page. How were you able to balance these two elements within the game?

  Our previous game, Astral Ascent, is super action-packed and has a ton of narration with 28 main characters, more than 8000 lines of dialogs all voiced in English & Japanese! For a roguelite game it’s very complicated as everything has to make sense through progression while Fallen Fates will have a more traditional approach of the narration even if we want the game to have large maps with freedom of exploration but even if we want a deep and immersive narration we will also let players decide how much they want to be be invested into narration but we will have a lot of efforts in this direction with again a fully voiced experience with some famous voice actors to be announced!

• What lessons have you learned from your previous projects that you applied to Fallen Fates?

  I would say about everything haha, for most of the team Astral Ascent was their first project in the game industry and even for the leads we only had Dark Devotion, our first game, as previous experience. Most of the team is made out of self-taught talents and we just keep learning everyday together! A strong DNA from the studio is the work on the boss fights, it is something we like doing since our first game and we pay extra attention to them, in particular building them as people with a background, motivations and absolutely epic patterns!

• How is the game development scene in France? Have you noticed any differences or trends since you’ve started?

  There are so many talented game development teams in France! I am always surprised to see how many amazing games are coming from here! On our side we have announced Fallen Fates for the first time through Actu-Gaming Showcase, a french showcase to announce new games and that’s not the only event like this and it seems like these events are growing with better and better projects showcased every year!

• What does “indie” mean to you?

  That is a difficult question, I would say being indie is mostly being able to create experiences that you really want to do. On our side it feels very special because Fallen Fates is our third project and the second we self-publish, we are super happy to be able to self-publish! It’s a lot of work but we feel fully in control of every piece of our journey and super connected to our players!

Fallen Fates does not have a release date just yet but you can wishlist the game on Steam now to stay up to date on upcoming news.