THE GREAT GAIAS

Sam: All right, so let’s start off with something easy: your name and the name of the game. 

Swan: My name is Brian Swan. This is called The Great Gaias and we released it back in 2018 on Steam. 

Sam: And what do you do for the company?

Swan: I’m part creator, so it’s me and my friend Matt Pepelardo. He was my dungeon master for our Dungeons & Dragons campaign, and he started making this by himself as a hobby just to show the Dungeons & Dragons crew, just like I was like, “Oh look, it’s our campaign on a video game.” And I came over one day to play it a little bit and I was like, “You know, this is getting pretty good. How about I help you? We throw some money at it and try and release it commercially?” And then seven years later we got the game.

Sam: All right, what would you say inspired you all the most? 

Swan: Dungeons & Dragons, definitely. For this game, a heavy inspiration was Final Fantasy VI. That’s my personal favorite Final Fantasy, and we tried adding a lot of elements, especially, like a main, a big cast like Final Fantasy VI. We have seventeen playable characters in The Great Gaias. All of them have their own unique class, skills, and side stories you can do throughout the game. 

Sam: And you said it took about seven years altogether. If you could go back and change anything, what would you change? If anything. 

Swan: Marketing. We have no experience with anything, but a lot of that time for the seven years was learning how to make a game, but we underestimated how important marketing was. We’re not very good with social media and verbiage. We just go to conventions trying to get the name out. 

Sam: Of the development process, what has been your favorite part so far? 

Swan: I mean, working with my friends who, you know, we’ve been friends for decades and it’s great working with him, coming up with new stories. Sometimes we’ll just take a day to spitball ideas of lore and building lore around the universe we created. That’s really fun for me. I just love every aspect of working on video games and I hope one day that I can make it my full-time job. 

Sam: Is there anything else you would like our audience to know about the game? 

Swan: Well, you can find it on Steam, it’s $20. It’s over 100 hours to beat the game, so it’s very meaty. We’re working on the sequel right now. It’s called Gjallarhorn and that Steam page is up also. It’s been in development for about three years. And yeah, check us out.