An Interview With - Robert Boyd

For our first-ever Gammabit Interview, we managed to get a hold of Robert Boyd, one-half of the team behind the fantastic Breath of Death VII: The Beginning on the Xbox Live Indie Games Service. Apart from designing games, Robert also reviews and discusses Indie Games on his blog, Zeboyd.

Here is the interview for your reading pleasure:


Kyle K: For those who don't already know. What exactly is Breath of Death VII?

Robert Boyd: Breath of Death VII: The Beginning is a retro parody RPG on XBox Live
Indie Games.

KK: Why a "Retro-Parody RPG?" Why not something a little more serious?

RB: Breath of Death VII actually started out as a more serious RPG since I
wanted some variety from my previous e-book games (Molly the
Were-Zompire & Epiphany in Spaaace! - both of which are pretty silly),
but as soon as we came up with the title, I realized there was no
point in fighting it and we went for full fledged parody. Something
like that seems to happen with all of my projects - I'm just not cut
out to do serious stuff.

 KK: How long did it take you to put together B.O.D?

RB: From the moment I emailed (Co-designer) William Stiernberg asking him if he wanted to team up with me to make Breath of Death VII to the day that the game actually came out on the XBox Live Marketplace was a period of about 3 months.

KK: As you're aware, B.O.D. is one of the top-selling games on the Xbox Indie
Service, did you expect it to be so successful?

RB: We were both hoping, of course, that it would be a top rated game and
sell a lot of copies, but when we saw the game climb up in the top
rated list and eventually stabilize at the #2 spot, we were both
floored. We had hoped for top 10, so #2 (with a stint in #1 for a few
days) was amazing. Just today, I saw that a FAQ for Breath of Death
VII was the 10th most requested FAQ on GameFAQs which is just
unbelievable for an XBox Live Indie Game.

As for sales, we just broke 10,000 copies sold and we're still selling
a couple hundred/day or more so we're pretty pleased with that. It's
no James' Silva's Z0MB1ES (which sold 200k in 8 months), but it's
still very nice.

KK: Your previous two games were text-based RPGs. Why did you decide to do

something different with B.O.D?

RB: After my two text-based games ended up only selling a few hundred
copies each, I wasn't sure what to do. Should I keep trying to make
text-based games into a viable income stream or should I do try for a
more ambitious game like a full-fledged RPG? In my depression, I was
almost ready to give up game development all together, when the idea
for Breath of Death VII came into my head. At around that same time,
William Stiernberg made an off-handed remark that he would like to get
into XBLIG development and since I had been impressed with his sprite
work in a previous project of his, I asked him if he would like to
team up for a game idea I had. Thus, Breath of Death VII was born.

KK: Please tell me there's going to be a sequel?

RB: There will not be any sequels to Breath of Death VII, but we might do
some prequels down the road if the demand is high enough. Our next RPG
(which we hope to have finished in August) is similar in style to
Breath of Death VII, although bigger and improved in many aspects so
if you liked Breath of Death VII, we hope you'll enjoy our next game
even more.