Behind the ships, characters, dialogue, interfaces, and tactical battles of Frontier: Path of Shadows are real people — so today, we thought it was finally time to introduce ourselves properly.
Who kept production moving? Who turned ideas into game systems? Who wrote all those words, and who made sure they looked good on screen? And most importantly, what do all these people do when they’re not making games — and what do they think you should pay special attention to while playing Frontier: Path of Shadows?
Maria — Producer and Creative Director
Maria plays games of all kinds, loves traveling, dancing, keeping up with new technology and — deserving a category of its own — sleeping.
On Frontier: Path of Shadows, Maria handles production and effectively leads the team: she sets priorities, helps make key project decisions, and makes sure all the different parts of development come together into a coherent whole. She also leads the game’s marketing, from the overall strategy to deciding how and where we tell players about Frontier.
What should you pay attention to? The setting, of course. Maria has been playing tabletop RPGs set in the Frontier universe for eight years, and she has no intention of stopping:
“It’s incredibly alive, interesting, and diverse.”
Alexey — Business Development
Alexey enjoys fencing, live-action role-playing, traveling and, in his own words, work as a hobby.
On Frontier, he is responsible for developing the project’s external relationships: looking for new opportunities to collaborate and talking to potential partners.
As for what players should pay attention to, Alexey points to three of the game’s central elements: the story, the characters, and the combat system.
Nikita — World and Concept Creator
Nikita works in IT, designs tabletop RPGs, and creates fictional settings. Outside work, he enjoys fencing, tabletop and live-action role-playing games, traveling, and adventures of various kinds.
Nikita created the world of Frontier and the original idea behind the game, so a large part of what you encounter while traveling through the sector ultimately grew out of the setting he created.
What should you pay attention to? The tactical battles. Some encounters made even the setting’s creator stop and seriously think about how to get out of a difficult situation. And, naturally, the world and its characters:
“We did our best!”
Dmitry — Lead Game Designer
Dmitry’s main hobby is role-playing games. He has been playing them since 2004 and running them since 2011 — both tabletop RPGs and live-action games. In the end, that hobby is exactly what brought him into professional game development.
“They say if you turn your hobby into your job, you’ll never work a day in your life. I did exactly that. Speaking from experience: you’ll never have a day off in your life.”
Dmitry is especially fond of science fiction in almost all its forms. Some of his favorite universes include Star Trek, Firefly, Dune, and Battlestar Galactica. He is also interested in Japanese and Chinese culture, watches anime, dramas, and samurai films, loves Kurosawa, and is always happy to find a good mystery.
On Frontier: Path of Shadows, Dmitry was responsible for the game’s overall pool of systems and for making sure those systems worked together with the narrative.
What should you pay attention to? The way different parts of the game work together.
“I deliberately don’t want to say something like, ‘Look at the combat — that’s the important part.’ The important thing is the game as a whole. Its different parts support and embody one another.”
Evgeny — Tech Lead and Lead Developer
Among Evgeny’s main interests are his family and two children, artificial intelligence, and his own side projects. He is also one of the people responsible for making sure our wonderful ideas eventually turn into things that actually work.
What should you pay attention to? Evgeny particularly points to the combat system — the part of the game where technical implementation, mechanics, and a whole web of interactions finally come together and start putting the player to the test.
Evgeny also specifically asked us to inform everyone that he is the world’s only non-boring programmer-troll. We are honoring that request.
Tasia — Narrative Designer and Writer
Tasia is a tabletop RPG enthusiast and a fan of narrative-driven games. Some of her favorites are Night in the Woods, Dragon Age, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and, of course, Disco Elysium.
On Frontier, Tasia worked on narrative design and writing, as well as the localization of the in-game text.
Her favorite parts of the game include exploring space and scanning planets. When it comes to the characters, she especially enjoyed working on Alice’s backstory, the dynamic between Marco and Akira, and Khan:
“He turned out to be much more interesting and complex than just a mentor character who hands out quests and wise advice on schedule.”
Alexander — Programmer
In his free time, Alexander mostly, in his own words, enjoys life: hanging out with friends, playing piano and guitar, watching shows, reading books, and building his own utilities and side projects. His favorite movie is Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
On the team, Alexander works on programming.
What should you pay attention to?
“The game has one hell of a story and some great battles. What else do you need in life?”
Anna — UI/UX & VFX Designer
Anna loves narrative-focused games, beautiful art, books, and her cat, who regularly likes to “help” her work.
On Frontier, Anna is responsible for UI design.
One of her favorite things to work on was the Symbiont status display. The team went through a lot of different approaches before settling on how this system should look in the final game.
What should you pay attention to? Besides the Symbiont, Anna especially recommends exploring the map and trying out everything it has to offer. Not everything interesting on the Frontier lies directly along the path of the main story.
Konstant — Assistant Manager
Konstant is a gamer, role-player, and game master for both tabletop RPGs and live-action role-playing games. He loves the Dragon Age series and classic BioWare games, while one of the more recent games that particularly impressed him was The Blood of Dawnwalker.
He is also a Tolkien fan, an avid reader, and writes his own fictional worlds and stories. He is married and lives with five cats of varying degrees of audacity, so his experience managing chaos predates his work in game development.
Konstant joined the Frontier team during the later stages of development and helped with management and organizational tasks.
What should you pay attention to? The lore and the depth of the world.
“There’s much more to it than we were able to show in the game. Read the encyclopedia.”
Andrey — Marketing and a Bit of QA
When he isn’t promoting Frontier, Andrey goes cycling and skiing when the season allows, takes care of his pet lizard, reads both fiction and professional literature, and plays plenty of tabletop RPGs and PC games.
On the project, he works on marketing and social media, while also helping out with testing.
Andrey has one particularly practical piece of advice for your playthrough:
“Don’t forget to explore the Frontier whenever you get the chance. A single random encounter might make you a fortune and let you upgrade all your gear — or get you into some very serious trouble.”
That’s the team that spent the last two years on the other side of the screen, turning Frontier from ideas, documents, prototypes, text, and art into a complete game that you can now explore for yourselves.
And if meeting the team has left you with questions for any of us, feel free to leave them in the comments.
