Starfinder: Afterlight, a video game adaptation of Paizo's Starfinder TTRPG system, recently launched a Kickstarter in advance of its planned 2026 Early Access launch. The game, which is developed by Epictellers Entertainment, is a character-focused CRPG in a rich outer space setting. Players assemble a motley crew of companions to combat the deadly Afterlight, which threatens to snuff out all light in the galaxy. Starfinder: Afterlight is inspired by Baldur's Gate 3, Guardians of the Galaxy, and the developers' own love of tabletop gaming.
Epictellers Entertainment co-founders Ricard Pillosu and Albert Jane spoke to The Best War Games about the development process of Starfinder: Afterlight. They talked creating and casting the game's companions, the challenges of adapting Paizo's complex system into a video game format, and working with Baldur's Gate 3 actor Neil Newbon, who serves as the game's voice director. This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Bringing The Galaxy To A Video Game Format
The Best War Games: Starfinder is a complex game with a lot of complex classes, arguably more so than Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder. What was the most difficult class to implement mechanically in the game?
Pillosu: No question, Witchwarper. I mean, we're still working on it. What can't Witchwarper do? And it's not only what the Witchwarper can do, but also how the enemies react to it. So it's been hard — but it's fun.
The Best War Games: Rather than Dungeons and Dragons- style races, Starfinder has "Ancestries." And there are some more nonhuman ancestries, like the Skittermanders and the Barathu. Was it challenging recreating these Ancestries in a video game setting?
Pillosu: Yes. That was one of the things, I have to be honest, that made us hesitate to go with Starfinder. Because we love it, but, production-wise, it's a very big challenge. I would prefer to just do dwarves and elves. That would be easy. [Laughs]
The moment you look at the Kasatha, it's like, okay. That's four arms. And then you look at the Skittermander, and it's half the size, and there are six [arms]. And they can actually use those lower arms to walk, if they get a specific feat. And it's like — Oh my God, how many animators are we going to need for this?
What we are doing is, we have spent six, seven months trying to build the tools to have a rig that is quite flexible. So our rigger, Noa, built a rig that basically supports six arms, a tail, antennae, and everything. A human only uses like 50% of it. But at least we can map animation. Animations are the big thing. Modeling them is not a big challenge — animation is the big one.
And the second [challenge], believe it or not, is narrative. Because the moment you have a character, especially if they're playable, you need to reflect them in how they talk. What are the options that you can get into the narrative? Lashunta, for example. Lashunta, most of the time, are just telepathically telling you things. Yes, they feel emotions. They feel complex things. But how do you put that into the game? Or the Shirren. The Shirren can talk, but the way they talk — they don't like it much, and so they use telepathy. That's a pain. But it's also why Starfinder is different. It's a challenge worth thinking about.
The Best War Games: The story of Starfinder: Afterlight centers around the titular Afterlight, which is destroying all the light in the universe, and you find yourself having to stop it. It's something new that you added to the Starfinder setting. How early into development did the idea of the Afterlight come about?
Pillosu: Not that [early]. We first began with the pillars of the game. When you create a game, you create the pillars. You ask yourself — what's the number one most important thing, then what's number two and number three? For us, number one is the companions. Even the most strategic players like me — I'm the one who optimizes everything and goes crazy — if I don't feel hooked to the game emotionally, I don't spend much time with it. So we wanted to absolutely nail that part.
So, when we tackled the narrative, it was long, long days work-shopping all together in a room. [Laughs] We weren't living until we got it right. Trying to first work through those archetypes, those characters. Once we got them all next to each other, we were like, "This feels like a very crazy group." That Starfinder craziness.
Okay, now, what is the challenge they are going to have? Because that's secondary. Actually, not many people remember the final boss that you killed in some of those games, but they will remember the people who came with them. So I would say, out of those six months, when [name] was doing the rigging, creating the characters took around three months. And then we started talking about "What is the big thing? The challenge? The thing they need to do?" Starfinder is big. It's not about the small things, the "we need to solve the situation with that mafia guy on Akiton." You need to actually save the galaxy. So we went to Paizo, and we asked, "How epic can we be?" And they said, "Yes."
The Best War Games: So when you initially started working with Paizo, you didn't know yet that you were going to be the ones creating this big original story? Or did they say from the start, "you guys should make an original story"?
Pillosu: It was a chain of consequences. As I was saying, for us, companions are the big thing. And when you're playing a game of Pathfinder or Starfinder, you don't get companions, because the "companions" are the players. But since our focus was the companions, when we created them, we went, okay, what is the challenge that makes sense for them to be challenged on?
And then, at that point, it was actually a coincidence. Because Paizo said, we're doing Starfinder Second Edition. We said, do you guys want us to pick something from First Edition to use? And they said no. It doesn't feel right. We want to add something to the next wave of adventures. So we rolled with the Afterlight. It was a good idea. We needed to go with an original story. And Jenny at Paizo was totally on board. We asked what they liked about the story, and she said, "Everything." Said, "Guys, let's go. What are you waiting for?"
Crafting The Companions Of Starfinder: Afterlight
The Best War Games: That's awesome. So, since you started with the recruitable companions, who was the first companion you created, or did they all sort of get developed at once?
Pillosu: We have two writers, Felix and Isabel, who are in charge of companions. They work in parallel. We were like, you guys go and make the companions, and we'll create a challenge for them. But there are two characters who landed just the moment we saw them.
One was Kole. Kole's inspiration was Isa watching 80s movies — American Ninja, with Michael Dudikoff. And she's like, this is so cheesy. I love it. We need to put it into Starfinder. Then she looked at me like, we cannot do that. But absolutely, we can. Let's do this. Who would be the craziest guy to become an actor? Oh my God. We need to have a Vesk being an actor. Let's do that. And, since that moment, we haven't changed much. It just landed everywhere: when we showed it to the team, when we showed it to Paizo. They were like, fantastic, let's do it.
The other writer, Felix, immediately landed Lu. And the reason why, I think, is that there was a lot of discussion about using the Battle Angel Alita manga to inspire our characters. She doesn't know about her past. She wants to write her future. And, especially, there was one thing that we really wanted to land: the question, "Are you your programming?" She will be asking that during the whole game.
I don't want to spoil too much, but she knows that she was programmed to be an infiltrator and a seducer, to gather information, and she wants to get rid of that programming. Her whole quest is like, "Remove that thing from me, because that's not me." And every time she does something, she's second-guessing herself: "Am I doing that because this is my programming?" Even romance. If she approaches you, she thinks, no, maybe that's my programming trying to get me to seduce you. She thinks, "I want to know if that's me or not." She asks, how does our background define us?
The theme of "free will" landed really well with Lu, although we struggled a lot with the visuals — there were a lot of variations we went through with her. It was a difficult but rewarding process to get the right "feel" for her. She's dramatic, she's lethal, but she also has a big heart. I would say it was a full month with concept artists, just going back and forth until we got her down.
The Best War Games: You've been revealing Starfinder: Afterlight's companions two by two, showing them off via trailers leading up to the launch of the Kickstarter. What has the fan response and reactions been like to the trailers you've revealed so far?
Pillosu: People really like Tycho. [Laughs] We think he's very cool, but people think he's even cooler than we take him for. He really has an attitude, and I think that landed. We were a bit surprised by that. And then, the kind of chemistry between him and Kole, people asked, are you going to do some kind of animated series with them or something? [Laughs] The dynamic between those two is very Guardians of the Galaxy, which is not exactly what we wanted, but we are happy with it.
The Best War Games: My favorite of the companions you've revealed so far has got to be Sterling. Already, he's the one I want to romance. He's such a suave gentleman.
Pillosu: Sterling is also a character from Isabel. And this one has been a struggle. It's been difficult. Because doing a gentleman, a Kingsman in space, how do we tackle that? It's not easy. We had a lot of internal doubts, because being a gentleman is something that's outdated nowadays.
People do not want to have a revision of the concept of ex-Special Ops, but still extremely gentlemanly. He's not posh, he's not an a*shole. He's really a gentleman. We debated a lot — how do we present this kind of character? There were a lot of discarded concepts. Isa was like, here's my idea for a Starfinder romance. So she said, I'm going to give that to the players, because why not?
The Best War Games: The voice cast for Starfinder: Afterlight is amazing, with names like Fred Tatasciore and Carolina Ravassa, and, of course, your voice director, Neil Newbon. What was the casting process like, and how did you get Neil involved in the project?
Pillosu: I have to say, we are kind of dopes here. [Laughs] So Albert and I, we've worked on big productions, but voice casting was always someone else's job. So we approached Enrique [Garcia, of ICO Partners] and he helped us a lot. He said, hey, maybe you want to talk to Neil [Newbon]. Maybe there's something we could do there. Then we talked to Neil, and I was like, Oh my god, I'm talking to Neil Newbon. [Laughs]
But he's really lovely. He's so fantastic. We told him we didn't really know what we were doing very well, but we knew that voices were extremely important in this game. And he said, Okay, I like you guys. I will tell you how this is done. We can do this together — let's go for it. This is casting. This is how we do it. This is how we approach it. He has been a bit of a teacher also. I mean, again, there's no way to not love that guy.
When we were approaching casting, we tried not to get seduced by the big names. What we did is, I remember when we were casting for Lu and Sterling, it was a full weekend. We had 60 Lus and 60 Sterlings, and it was like, let's hear them again. Eyes closed. Without knowing the names. It was us and the writers, going again and again and again.
And at some point, you have the ten that you like, and you talk to Neil. And he'd say, this actor could have more voices for other [characters]. She has more range. This guy has less range, but he has a studio. This one is in the US, and there's a time [difference]. And there's a point when you have three or four, and he says, you go with your heart. And that's how we cast Melissa. We felt Melissa just was Lu. So the process has been very interesting for us. It's been new, but it's really been a lot of fun.
Jane: We'd never done it before, and it's amazing to be part of that. We know development. We've been doing games for eight years. So a lot of the process is iteration for us — let's do this part, let's do that part. But voicing, it's something totally new. And it's amazing, to see how everything takes place, and how the voice goes into the game and everything.
Pillosu: You remember how Tycho was cast? We got very few, because we were in a hurry to cast him. We got like five or six. And we got some voice actors who are super well renowed. And you see the files, and it's like, maybe, a megabyte, half a megabyte. And then we got one that was 20 megabytes. I was like, Neil, something must be wrong. And he said, no, he just likes the character. It's great.
And we played it, and he just kept talking. Just kept coming up with sentences about Tycho. Coming up with what Tycho likes, and mumbling "I don't like this guy" and stuff like that. I said, yes, that's Tycho. Who is this guy? It was [Inel Tomlinson]. Neil introduced us to Inel, who is such an amazing actor, he's done so much, he can do stand-up comedy. And he goes into Tycho, and it's amazing. Just, "Yo, I'm Tycho now." For one hour, he does not get out of character. He only talks like that, even when Neil is correcting him. Neil's like, "Oh, you need to do this," and Inel's voice goes there. He's just talking and talking. Most of Tycho's lines are him improvising. You just say to him, "You do it," and he does.
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- Developer(s)
- Epictellers Entertainment
- Publisher(s)
- Epictellers Entertainment
WHERE TO PLAY
- Genre(s)
- CRPG, Adventure, Strategy, Sci-Fi
