We were lucky to catch up with Jae Yoo recently and have shared our conversation below.
Jae, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you tell us about a time where you or your team really helped a customer get an amazing result?
We had a playtest session in Feb 2022 with a build that had a very rough 90% of the game, Eternights playable.
I asked all the game testers to record their gameplay for feedback.
And one of the game testers was recording her voice on top of the gameplay record accidentally.
When she reached Eternights’s ending sequence,
She cried.
After that, I asked a few other testers and found out she wasn’t alone.
Out of 21 testers, 11 cried, and others expressed a strong emotional impact.
As I wanted to make that percentage to be higher, I’ve asked Sony PlayStation that we need to delay the game so I can polish more on the gameplay and more people will reach this end smoothly experience-wise.
After all, Eternights is a stroy-driven game, so it oder to complete the experience, it is necessary to see the story’s ending.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Hello I am founder of Studio Sai and developer of Eternights. I am basically doing programming, art, story, and producing for the game.
Previously, I was working for Apple, working on Apple Vision Pro.
Studio Sai is a game development studio working on the relationships you can forge inside slightly peculiar worlds.
I started developing the game as a solo developer around the middle of 2019 as a hobby while having a full time job. I was enjoying a game called Catherine Full Body at the time and one of my friends suggested I try a game called Persona 5 which turned out to have an 8 hours long tutorial :) But it was actually pretty inspiring because I always wanted to mash up a strong character driven story game with heavy romance elements. After beating P5, I had to play P4G and P3FES. I always wanted to start a project that mixes #Apocalypse, #Romance and #RealtimeAction, and the modern Persona series gave me a good kickoff point.
I started working on small gameplay snippets and uploading it to different subreddits. One day, a game investor contacted me for a demo. I didn’t have any demo at the time so I had to create something like a 7 min long demo super fast, which eventually turned into a green light for funding. It was not an easy decision for me to leave a full time job at Apple but I had to do it. I started working on Eternights full time in June 2020 and after 1.5 years, it became a Sony Playstation console-exclusive title and was announced at State of Play. This won’t be possible without people who have supported me along the way.
Developing Eternights has been a great journey and I have learned a lot.
Have you ever had to pivot?
I started developing the game as a solo developer around the middle of 2019 as a hobby while having a full time job. I was enjoying a game called Catherine Full Body at the time and one of my friends suggested I try a game called Persona 5 which turned out to have an 8 hours long tutorial :) But it was actually pretty inspiring because I always wanted to mash up a strong character driven story game with heavy romance elements. I always wanted to start a project that mixes #Apocalypse, #Romance and #RealtimeAction, and the modern Persona series gave me a good kickoff point.
I started working on small gameplay snippets and uploading it to different subreddits. One day, a game investor contacted me for a demo. I didn’t have any demo at the time so I had to create something like a 7 min long demo super fast, which eventually turned into a green light for funding. It was not an easy decision for me to leave a full time job but I had to do it. I started working on Eternights full time at Apple in June 2020 and after 1.5 years, it became a Sony Playstation console-exclusive title and was announced at State of Play. This won’t be possible without people who have supported me along the way.Developing Eternights has been a great journey and I have learned a lot.
Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?
I chose this question as above long answer would be great suit for above first answer.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.studiosai.dev/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/StudioSaiGames/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/studiosaigames/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jyoo86/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/StudioSaiGames
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/studiosaigames
- Other: Discord: https://discord.gg/studiosaigames Subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Eternights/ & https://www.reddit.com/r/studiosaigames/