Hello, friends!
Since the game was released, you have asked us a tremendous number of questions—in comments, discussions, private messages, and during streams. Some of them were so intriguing that we wanted to give detailed answers.
So we gathered the most interesting questions and tried to answer them in as much detail as possible in this article. Here, we will discuss the game, its development, and the work of Schisma Games—in short, everything interesting enough to warrant more than a brief answer.
A word of warning: this turned into a long read. But which of us narrative game enthusiasts could ever be frightened by lengthy texts? 🙂
Enjoy!
Questions About the Game’s Development
How many years did you work on The Life and Suffering of Prince Jerian?
We worked on the game for about four years. The core team first came together in August 2022—and even now, after release, we are still working on the game, making adjustments and fixing issues that could prevent players from fully immersing themselves in Jerian’s story.
How much has the team changed since the development of Sir Brante?
A significant portion of the team behind The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante continued working on Prince Jerian.
Schisma Games retained series and narrative creator Fedor Slyusarchuk (Theodor), lead game designer Sergey Aksyonov (Chip), programmer Ilya Spitsin, composer and sound designer Fedor Trubin, as well as our writers and editors Evgeniya Patarakina, Anna Volodina, and Valentina Yarkova.
But of course, the team changed considerably: it expanded and grew stronger in every area, from production management and art direction to narrative and game design.
How many people worked on the project?
Around 22 people worked on the project in total, although the team never had more than 17 members at once.
The project began with four people, and the team then gradually expanded in every area. At one point, the narrative department had eight people, while the art department had six. Once the main story and narrative work was complete, the team gradually began to shrink. A team of ten people prepared the game for release.
We could not have done this without our publisher’s team, who provided tremendous assistance with testing, localization, marketing, and community management. So, if we also count the publisher’s specialists who were directly involved in the project, around 15 more people should be added to our internal team. This project could never have happened without their help.
Broadly speaking, what was the game development process like?
Naturally, it all began with a concept and an understanding of what kind of game you wanted to make and why.
The concept for Prince Jerian began to emerge while we were still working on the first game, the story of Sir Brante. We were interested in creating a kind of duology and showing events in the Empire not from the perspective of Brante—a self-made man—but from that of someone at the pinnacle of power, right at the heart of this world’s elite.
We knew it would be a game about the “powerlessness of the powerful,” the connection between past, present, and future, and an Arknian's search for an identity inextricably linked to their state.
Once the concept had been established, work began on the game’s overall model: the main attributes describing society, the protagonist, and state policy. This model was intended to define the attribute-based language of our story and its main lines of conflict.
We then created the overarching storyline and global structure of the game before developing each chapter individually: its central conflict, characters, key dilemmas, and narrative “shoots” that would continue to grow in subsequent chapters.
After that, each chapter was divided into scenes, giving the story a detailed chronology. We created a brief outline for every scene, defining its purpose, plot, reversal, final choice, and consequences. One of our writers would then write the scene, after which it underwent eight to ten rounds of editing and proofreading.
At the same time, illustrations and sound design were being created and music was being selected. Meanwhile, work continued on the engine, the overall visual concept, the interfaces, and specific game design solutions.
Every completed chapter, and later the entire game, was repeatedly tested, reassembled, and reworked. You could say that this is our creative method: rework and rework until it finally feels as though the original concept has taken tangible form.
Questions About Content and Gameplay
Why are systems that restrict choices and “lock” them so important in your games? Why not let players choose whatever they want?
We treat our games as separate worlds with their own laws, restrictions, and demands. From our perspective, the game world should not bend to the player’s wishes. Players should understand the laws of that world, find their place within it, and try to change it through their own efforts.
The “locks” establish these restrictions and laws, forcing players to answer for past decisions and consider how they can achieve what they want in the future. Without “locks,” our protagonists would have neither suffering nor life.
What is the purpose of the “personality locks”? Why did you decide to add them to the game?
One of the game’s most important themes is the relationship between a ruler and their state, which we have discussed many times. This relationship has several dimensions. One is the influence of the “system” on the character’s personality, while another is the effect of the protagonist’s inner world on the decisions they make as a ruler. Our intention was for the Empire to mold the protagonist into its own image. And if the protagonist wants to change anything without losing his mind, he must learn to govern not only his state, but also himself.
It is precisely this interconnection and focus on the protagonist's individuality that the personality model and its associated “locks” provide.
Why do you recommend playing with consequences revealed?
There are three main reasons.
We do not want players to play a guessing game with us, trying to work out what we have planned for the end of a scene. We want players to see the consequences of their decisions, take responsibility for them, and not shift that responsibility onto us.
We believe that choices become more complex and interesting when you play with consequences revealed. You must think not only about how to act “in good conscience” or according to your role, but also about how your actions will affect the world around you. The dilemma between conscience and practical consequences is one of the fundamental principles of our gameplay.
Revealed consequences are not hints, but information available to and understood by the character that the player may not necessarily know. This allows us to avoid overloading the game with lengthy descriptions. To make an informed decision on many political issues, Jerian would need to study numerous documents, speak with dozens of people, and conduct a thorough analysis. But we do not want to turn the game into paperwork. We have a more convenient approach: show the results of the protagonist’s deliberations and conclusions in the table of consequences visible to the player.
Why can’t players save at any point in the game?
All the game’s complexity and value grow out of its context—the thousands of threads connecting Jerian to his life and his Empire. It is important to us that players experience not only heroic paths of destiny filled with victories, but defeats and failures as well. In our view, they are no less meaningful than stories of triumph.
So it was important to us that players not lose the game’s context and, if they did decide to replay something, return to the beginning of a chapter rather than reject their defeats and the consequences of their decisions by abusing “save scumming.”
However, based on player reviews and requests, we saw that the ability to save at any time is indeed one of the most requested features. That’s why we explored ways to implement it and, in a recent patch, introduced the option to create copies of save files, making it easier for players to explore the game and experiment with various playthrough options.
Why does branching work differently in Prince Jerian than in Sir Brante? Hasn’t the number of branches decreased?
No, the number of branches has not decreased and may even have increased.
However, nonlinearity itself works differently in Prince Jerian. Sir Brante had one clear point that determined almost the entire remainder of the game: the choice of Lot. Prince Jerian is different: it has many small storylines and hidden endings that you can miss even during childhood, in the first chapter.
While our goal in Sir Brante was to show the different lives the protagonist could lead, in Prince Jerian it was important for us to create a highly nuanced spectrum of possibilities for his life. We wanted players to choose the details: do friends, children, or their own sanity matter to them? Precisely how can they turn this world upside down or change their own destiny?
We devoted a significant portion of our work to this—we wanted thinking about exactly what you want your life to be like to become a full-fledged part of the game rather than being reduced to choosing from a small number of predefined options.
Why did you decide to make a game focusing on political history and the fate of the Empire?
We have been interested in these questions since our days of live-action role-playing games and the development of Sir Brante. We wanted to make an honest game about politics, a ruler, and that ruler’s personality all at once.
Traditionally, games explore politics primarily through strategy games rather than RPG games. Politics exists as a system of attributes and models rather than as the protagonist’s personal experience—his views, feelings, and doubts. It was important to us to humanize politics and let it pass through the soul of both the character and the player.
We felt it was important to speak honestly about power, the ideologies and cultural traditions underpinning it, and possible scenarios for changing society. We believe that this conversation is especially timely and necessary today.
How did you choose the character for the new game? Why Prince Jerian specifically?
The game’s very theme led us toward such a character. He needed to be someone who possessed power without being at the very top of the hierarchy. He needed to be part of the system while retaining a certain degree of freedom.
In other words, only a Tempest could occupy that position in this world and era. But Flavius, Gaius, Cornelius, and Servilia were already too firmly established as characters. Within our setting, they have their own personalities, histories, and destinies.
Jerian, meanwhile, proved to be the character into whom players could best project themselves.
Don’t you think you made the game too serious and mature, losing the adventurous spirit of Sir Brante?
Yes, we understand that. But we did not want to repeat Sir Brante. We wanted to make a different game—one that was more mature and more psychological, inviting players to seek their own answers to many questions about their lives and formulate their own goals.
And we are delighted to see that this kind of mature conversation has proven truly important to many players.
Which works of literature, film, and gaming inspired you while you were working on Prince Jerian?
This could make for an enormous list, so we will try to highlight the most important and prominent sources of inspiration.
Literature:
Heinrich Mann — Young Henry of Navarre and Henry, King of France
Thornton Wilder — The Ides of March
Robert Penn Warren — All the King’s Men
Viktor Frankl — Man’s Search for Meaning
Umberto Eco — The Name of the Rose
Film:
I, Claudius — a miniseries directed by Herbert Wise and based on the novel by Robert Graves
12 Angry Men — directed by Sidney Lumet
Coriolanus — directed by Ralph Fiennes
Titus — directed by Julie Taymor
The Last Temptation of Christ — directed by Martin Scorsese
Games:
Long Live the Queen — Hanako Games
Crusader Kings — Paradox Development Studio
Tyranny — Obsidian Entertainment
Pathologic — Ice-Pick Lodge
Frostpunk — 11 bit studios
What is the basis of your chosen art style? Which tradition did you draw upon?
It was important to us to use the visual style to convey the difference between Sir Brante and Prince Jerian: to depict the more austere and refined world of the Arknian aristocracy while drawing on European artistic traditions from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.
We therefore wanted to preserve the feel of book typography from the late modern period, while drawing on the engraving traditions of Albrecht Dürer and Gustave Doré and the more modern Romantic symbolism of Rockwell Kent in our illustrations.
Did you use AI while working on the game, and why are you being accused of doing so?
We used AI as an auxiliary tool in our workflow, primarily for communication between the writers and the art department. For example, it helped someone who could not draw formulate and visualize an idea for the artist of what an illustration should look like.
Like many modern tools, artificial intelligence technologies have already become part of everyday work in many fields, and we see nothing wrong with using them where they can genuinely streamline workflows. At the same time, it is fundamentally important to us to distinguish between using technology as a tool and creating the creative content itself. The Life and Suffering of Prince Jerian is first and foremost an original work of art and literature, so it was important to us that everything included directly in the game be created by people. Every text, every illustration, and every musical composition reflects the work and decisions of specific creators.
Not a single element of the game’s content was created by artificial intelligence. All illustrations, texts, and music are the work of our scriptwriters, writers, artists, and composer.
We have indeed been accused of using AI to create illustrations, primarily because of visual errors found in some of them. We see and acknowledge these errors ourselves, and we are working to correct them. However, they were caused not by the use of neural networks, but by our own oversights and the need to create a large number of original illustrations in a relatively short period of time for us.
Despite individual errors, we believe our art department has done an outstanding job, and we genuinely like the resulting visual style. We believe it serves the game’s concept extremely well.
Why does the game use a different map of the Empire?
We did not want to reuse the map from Sir Brante because it was more decorative: it showed the main elements of the world but revealed almost nothing about its structure.
For a political game and Jerian’s story, it was important to us to show the structure of the Empire—its mountains, rivers, forests, cities, roads, and castles. This kind of map reveals the “skeleton” of the imperial order.
That was our primary focus. However, to keep the map from becoming overloaded with information, we had to omit provincial borders and certain other features.
Who is your favorite character in the game?
There is no single answer to this question. We have a fairly large team, and everyone has their own favorites.
Moreover, we generally find it difficult to talk about which characters we like. Our task was to make every character as complex as possible and give them their own truth—one that we understand.
That is why our “favorites” are very often the characters furthest removed from our own values and beliefs. Simply because their voices truly resonated within the game, and we were able to hear and understand them—even if we were not prepared to accept their views or actions.
Why don’t you comment on the game’s plot or the characters’ fates, and why don’t you consider any ending “canonical”?
We believe that a game is an intermediary between people that helps them discuss important and interesting subjects.
It is important to us that this conversation take place among equals and that no one's voice become the voice of absolute truth.
Creators are always tempted to adopt an authoritarian position and start explaining precisely how their work should be understood. But Umberto Eco’s concept of the reader’s role is far closer to our hearts. It matters more to us that players analyze, interpret, and reflect on the game themselves. This gives it a chance to produce more meanings than we put into it ourselves.
Only then, we believe, does a game have the chance to succeed as a work of contemporary art.
Are you satisfied with the game’s sales, or were you hoping for more?
Of course, sales are extremely important to any indie studio: they largely determine whether we can continue our life’s work. You always want more resources so that you can create even bolder and more complex projects. So, naturally, we would like to be more successful—including commercially. But we understood what kind of subject we were taking on and why we were doing it.
That is why your feedback, social media discussions, private messages, reviews, and playthroughs on YouTube and Twitch mean far more to us than sales figures alone.
This is exactly the conversation we wanted. We are tremendously grateful to you for it, and we are certain that Jerian will continue finding his player—and conversation partner—for a long time to come.
General Questions and the Future of Schisma Games
What are you planning to do to improve the game?
No matter how thoroughly we test the game, some bugs can only be discovered once real players start playing it. That’s why, since the game’s release, we've been carefully reviewing your reports and actively working to fix the problems you've brought to our attention.
We have slightly expanded the game’s functionality and polished its interfaces to make the gameplay more comfortable. At the same time, in response to numerous requests, we added the ability to create custom save files. We fixed errors in the illustrations, typos in the text, and translation issues. In addition, we made minor changes to the text and story and added new sections to the epilogues so that the consequences of Jerian’s decisions and life path are reflected throughout every aspect of the story. And, of course, we fixed functional issues in the code related to certain event triggers.
At this point, we believe that we've addressed all the major issues we are aware of, so any further updates, if there are any, will most likely be relatively minor.
If you notice any remaining bugs or run into any issues, please let us know.
In the future, we will likely expand the list of platforms on which the game will be available.
Do you plan to continue making games? In which direction would you like to develop?
Yes, we would very much like to continue making games, and we are currently looking for ways to do so.
We remain interested in questions of culture, politics, and human life. We believe that this is where our subject lies.
We will most likely remain faithful to the narrative role-playing genre, but we will certainly experiment with new models and mechanics to find interesting new solutions. With each subsequent game, we will once again try to create an experience unlike either Prince Jerian or Sir Brante. It will have to offer players something genuinely new.
Do you plan to return to the setting of The Life and Suffering and make a game about a new protagonist?
That is entirely possible. We already have a theme, a protagonist, and even a gameplay concept. But before we can make such a game, we first need to understand whether people truly want it.
What do you expect from players? How can we help you?
We would be delighted if you continued exploring the game—not only its plot and “secret endings,” but also its meanings.
We would be very interested to see how you interpret the game. What is it about? What themes does it explore? What questions does it leave behind? This conversation is what matters most to us.
But, of course, we would also greatly appreciate your reviews on Steam, Metacritic, and other platforms. Unfortunately, numbers sometimes determine whether we can continue making games.
Why should anyone make games and pursue indie development?
Our experience is highly unusual. You could say that we have been very fortunate: we completed the very first project we undertook, developed our ideas further in a second game, and found our audience. We were given the chance to continue making games.
That truly is a great stroke of luck.
In our experience, indie development brings a tremendous number of workplace problems, financial risks, hateful comments, unexpected tasks, cutthroat competition, business disasters, and an ocean of unregulated working hours. You will find anger, depression, disappointment, and anxiety that never releases its grip on you. And you will almost certainly not find money.
That is why you should pursue indie development only if you have some other ambition—one unrelated to money or spectacular success. Only if, despite all these drawbacks, you still believe in games for some reason and want to devote yourself specifically to making them.
Thank you to everyone who read all the way to the end! We hope you enjoyed taking a deeper look and learning more about what went into creating our game. And special thanks to everyone who asked questions, shared their thoughts, discussed the game, and continues to stand by us—it is precisely this interest that keeps the conversation going.
If you are looking for technical information or have encountered technical issues, please see the separate FAQ we published previously:
[dynamiclink href="https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2936290/view/688641156126343628"]
If you are still having trouble with the game, have encountered other technical issues, or have noticed errors, typos, or localization problems, please contact us and let us know. We would be very grateful for any information that helps us improve the game.
The best way to contact us is through Discord, where you will find our most active community. You can post in the relevant discussion, create a separate question, or contact our administrators directly through private messages. You will also find many like-minded people there with whom you can discuss the plot, characters, different ways to play, and share your theories and impressions of the game.
We look forward to welcoming you to our community! 💚
