Lost in Limbo: An Exclusive Interview with RavenStar Games
Written by Lover's Lens, Writer, Gamer Girl, Podcast Host, Cat Lover
Published on September 4, 2024
Otome.com: Lost in Limbo is more than just a game; it’s a beautifully crafted experience that pulls you in with its mix of dark fantasy, romance and smoking hot love interests.
I had the absolute pleasure of chatting with the developers, and let me tell you, they’re some of the friendliest and most dedicated people you could meet. They’re a tight-knit group, pouring their hearts into this project to make their dream a reality.
Stick around to catch some exclusive news, see content that’s never been revealed, and explore the inspirations that fuel the creators of Lost in Limbo. You’ll also get a glimpse into the personal journeys of the developers bringing this unique game to life. Trust me, this is one game you’ll want to keep on your radar, and I’m excited to spill all the details with you.
Studio Background and Origins
Could you tell us a bit more about the history of RavenStar Games?
Seyl: So, the four of us have been friends for almost 8 years now. Kayden and I, in fact, have known each other for ten years. Astro, Raquel and I went to college together to study Fine Arts, and we knew we wanted to be in the videogame industry. However, as we graduated, we realized it’s not as easy as it seems. I’ll save the details, but our funding of Ravenstar Games is kind of us taking the plunge to try and make a living in an industry that rarely treats its new talents well.
After years of looking for a way to get in the industry and failing, we decided we had nothing to lose trying to do it ourselves, so here we are!
As for challenges—I’d say everything has been a challenge. Funding a studio in Spain is not easy and not cheap; our government doesn’t really offer any kind of aid, and the taxes are brutal. In addition, building yourself from the ground is very difficult when talking about marketing / social media: we didn’t have many followers in our individual social media accounts, we didn’t personally know a lot of fellow indie developers, and we didn’t have a previous reputation, so we knew we were starting with basically nothing. Somehow we managed to earn some attention, though!
Raquel: We have always been fond of art (Astro, Seyl and I knew each other studying Fine Arts), videogames and Dungeons and Dragons (in fact Astro, Seyl and Kayden became our DMs at some point). We knew that we liked to create worlds, experiences, and what better way to do it than through a videogame. Also, we wanted to introduce Spanish elements such as names, traditional clothing, decoration —among many other things that you will be able to see in a more extended version of the game— in order to create a visual identity that would represent us culturally.
Kayden:I met Seyl in highschool 10 years ago. We did not go to the same classes but we were good friends at the time! After highschool, Seyl met Astroand Raquel in college. I didn’t follow Seyl’s academic path so I met them later around 2017. We started chatting in Discord, hanging out irl, playing videogames, Dungeons and Dragons… and one day of 2021, Seyl would tell us about an idea she had. “What if we made a visual novel?”.
Astro: I personally studied for a science degree, but turned into art at the last minute. During college, we started knowing each other and we began our lasting relationship. The idea of making a game came naturally, since we have always loved playing together a great variety of games, and we decided to make an official team to make our own games for other people to play, always ensuring that whatever game we make will be the best it can be.
I won’t get into much detail about the challenges, since Seyl has already done a great job at acknowledging them. About myself, my family doesn’t really grasp the concept of our work and the video-game industry in general, which has led to some arguments. Nothing we can’t overcome!
Do you find it necessary to support yourselves with other jobs while working on “Lost in Limbo,” or have you been able to focus solely on the game?
Absolutely. We don’t have stable jobs to support ourselves, except for Kayden. We are artists taking jobs here and there, taking commissions, etc., while reaching out particularly to studios in hopes to get that stable job that could help us support us and the game. Sadly, it hasn’t happened yet, so we kind of have been able to focus on the game more or less. Last year we were studying for (another) master’s degree, so that got in the way of development.
Game Inspiration and Development
From its inception, how long did it take for the game to reach its current state of development?
My God—three years? We started back in June 2021. Our studies and taking on jobs slowed us down a lot, but we are happy with how far we’ve gotten!
“Lost in Limbo” is set in a captivating dark fantasy world. Where do you draw inspiration for the game’s setting and art style?
As the writer, my inspiration pool is full of games like Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Fable, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy, Dungeons and Dragons…Movies / books like The Chronicles of Narnia, Pan’s Labyrinth, or “Alas de fuego” and “Alas negras” by Spanish writer Laura Gallego were also key when it came to shaping my mind as a kid. Of course, a lot of anime, too
Could you tell us more about the writing process for “Lost in Limbo”? How did you approach creating such a balanced otome/horror narrative?
I’ve always loved horror and romance. I think fear and love are the emotions that shape our lives, our decisions and our personalities the most.
I must say this is my first time officially writing somethingfor others to read, so I’m happy to know you think it’s balanced!
I think the setting makes it easier to write the horror part; it’s a fearsome situation, the one the main character is in. Also, it’s in difficult and scary scenarios in which the best and worst of people come out, so I thought the romantic aspect of the game had a good chance to bloom naturally on its own. My relationship with horror is kind of funny because the mere thought of being scared scares me, so it’s difficult for me to interact with that media, but I love doing it. I love experimenting with writing just the most gruesome, horrible things, because I can just get lost in imagining it but still have control on when to stop and how far it goes.
What were your inspirations behind the characters, and which one did you find most fun to write?
As for our characters, obviously we wanted to have a distinguishable and diverse cast. All of them were created with an idea in mind, and the appeal to players was something to take into account. I’m a huge otome fan, so it was kind of easy to lean into tropes / personalities that I find attractive, like the flirtatious himbo, the grumpy one with a sad background, the gentleman with a twist… I can’t exactly pinpoint where the inspiration comes from, because it comes from a lot of different sources like the ones I cited above!
As my favorite one to write…Amon and Envy are just too much fun to write, both together and separated. I think they represent the polar opposites of our character pool—in a straight line from “Absolutely lovable” to “Wet and feral rat” I think Amon’s in the far left, and Envy’s in the right. The rest of the cast fall somewhere in that line!
“Lost in Limbo” has some amazing horror elements, represented not just through the artwork, but also in the visuals of the dialogue and choices. What inspired these creative choices?
I think “Doki Doki Literature Club” was my first time engaging with a visual novel that took Ren’py’s tools and went feral with it. I haven’t played it myself but I used to watch a lot of streams back in the day and I loved how the story was so reinforced by the visuals, the glitches, the sprites going wild, the quivering text…
On a visual novel, you have text, image, and sound; you can lean onto as many narrative tools as you want to, just like any other genre of video games, even if you are “limited” to those three.
With your Kickstarter campaign launching soon, what are your expectations for it?
At the time of writing this, our campaign has launched and we are 53% funded in six days! As a developer you always have hope of things going well, but we are aware of the dangers. Nothing guarantees us our game will be funded, and we can only keep working hard to promote it, gain some attention, and trust our efforts will be compensated.
How do you plan to use the support from the campaign to bring “Lost in Limbo” to life, and what are the key goals you hope to achieve through crowdfunding?
The campaign will allow us to work on Lost in Limbo’s development for three years in the worst case scenario, two in the best one, which is our development time frame. Our main goal will help us pay taxes so we can keep operating as a studio (and avoid jail), pay those who have aided us along the way, and hopefully give us some room to financially breathe while exclusively focusing us on the game.
Just funding the game would be perfect. We have some nice stretch goals, but if the game gets funded, I’m confident we’ll be able to eventually add some of them!
LGBTQ+ Representation
Could you share more about why this representation is so important to you and how you ensure it’s authentically portrayed in your work?
Our team is made of LGBTQ+ peeps, and all our loved ones fall one way or another in this category. In a time where “woke” and “LGBT agenda” is used to hurt us and the games our community works on, I think it’s important to be unapologetically straightforward with our intentions, our target audience, and our origins.
Romance has always been like a “joke” for the video game community, I think. All those April Fools visual novels / otome announcements huge companies used to partake in are proof of it. The disregard and sometimes hate for games that portray not only romance, but non-heteronormative romance and characters is something we have sadly not stride away from, at least not completely. Then you have titles like Baldur’s Gate 3 that have changed the mainstream aspect of the community (and still have been met with a lot of hate because of it). In the otome / visual novel community, you can see traces of this. For example, we got our first 1 star rating on itchio even before our demo was released, and it was by someone who allegedly hates on otomes with pronoun selection / not a canonical female MC. I think this is part of a much bigger conversation (because we women have to constantly fight for a space in the videogame community), but it always feels like a slap to know someone disregards your creation just because it includes a diversity they don’t agree with.
We obviously will use our own experiences and struggles as a way to channel and portray this representation. We are lucky to be surrounded by people with their own stories to share with us and their own lessons / teachings to offer us. We will, however, not talk about things we don’t know about or experiences we’ve not gone through. That’s for other creators to do.
How has the LGBTQ+ gaming community responded to the demo of “Lost in Limbo” and what impact do you hope your game will have on LGBTQ+ players?
We had a very good reception and a warm welcome into the community, especially by asexual peeps. I personally spoke about asexuality in our game as a core part of the experience, and one of our characters falls into the spectrum as a demisexual. I hope asexual players can enjoy the romance knowing the characters will respect their boundaries and their identity, even going as far as to talk about it freely like a loving partner should do. I hope our game inspires other asexual devs to tell their stories.
There’s more than asexual representation in the game. Envy and Lázaro are non-binary, Ara is a trans woman…and more, but it’s spoiler territory!
Community and Feedback
What has the community’s reaction been like, and how do you handle feedback from players?
We have gotten a lot of support, more than we expected. Our discord server is now flowing with people who talk about the game, show off their MCs, and overall just have a great time with us and other peeps.
Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, even when people didn’t enjoy the demo. We’ve gotten a lot of help from players in regards to accessibility, for example, about the pace of the demo, and more. I think when it comes to handling feedback you’ve to make a distinction between what’s strictly personal / taste related and what’s not. Some people dislike how the humorous parts are integrated into the script, some don’t. Here you have to keep your vision in mind and make a decision.
Some felt like the demo rushes a bit when it comes to meeting all the love interests, which is something that can be fixed and we were aware of, so you have to keep this in mind and fix it in the future because it will make a better experience for everyone, or almost everyone.
Also, you’ve to keep in mind that you will make mistakes. Constantly. And people will point it out, which is good, because only when you know about a problem can you start to fix it. So we knew from the beginning we wanted to gather as much feedback as possible right from the start, and we appreciate the time people take when writing to us about it. Of course there’s mean people out there (we’ve encountered some) but you have to try and brush that off.
Future Plans and Development
Do you have any other projects or ideas you’re excited to explore next?
We have! We have a bunch of ideas and genres we want to explore, but always including romance in them. After Lost in Limbo is completely done, and if things go well for us (fingers crossed!) we’ll start working on our next project!
Do you have an estimated timeline for the full release of “Lost in Limbo”?
As soon as the Kickstarter is over, and if we are funded, we’ll begin working on an Extended Free Demo that will showcase Lost in Limbo’s prologue like we envisioned, without the time restrictions and the rush to get our project out there. Then, we’ll work on the first chapter of every route to be offered for free, and from then, we’ll start working on the routes in pairs to keep the plot consistent.
We think the full game will take three years—two if our “Outsourcing” stretch goal is funded so wecanproperly hire Airyn, our background artist. So the full release should come in 2027!
Exclusive Content and Final Thoughts
If we reach our Kickstarter main goal, every backer will receive a digital Game Guide that will include a special written episode narrating what happened before the events of the demo, with some special illustrations like the one you see above. We’ve not made this public yet, so we thought it’d be nice to share it!
Is there anything else you’d like to share with the Otome.com community about RavenStar Games or “Lost in Limbo”?
We want to thank you and your community for giving us a chance to talk about our game and share it!
Lost in Limbo is our little passion project and we hope we can keep working on it. If you play the demo, we’d love to hear your thoughts!
Checkout the trailer here:
Otome.com: After spending time in the world of Lost in Limbo, I can honestly say this game is something truly special. As the main character, you’re pulled from everyday life into the eerie, mysterious realm of Limbo, where love and fear collide. What really sets Lost in Limbo apart is how the story draws you into the MC’s journey—someone with a strong personality but also vulnerable, making it easy to empathize with their struggles. At the same time, you have the power to shape who they become, through every choice and interaction.
Lost in Limbo explores themes such as the duality of immortality, family bonds, healing from trauma, forgiveness, acceptance, letting go of guilt, and love.
With partial voice acting, Lost in Limbo breathes life into its characters, making every choice feel that much more personal and intense. Also the gorgeous art style and unique visual effects that make the world feel so alive, yet eerily unsettling. So whether it’s the crumbling tower beneath a blood-red sky or a voice echoing from the shadows, Lost in Limbo knows how to evoke emotion and tension at every moment.
You’ll be facing seven deities, each with their own agendas and mysteries. Will you fall in love or fall into disgrace? That’s up to you. The demo alone offers 42k words of immersive storytelling, stunning CGs, and over 25 choices, including one bad ending.
If you haven’t played the free demo yet, now’s the perfect time! And be sure to check out their Kickstarter—this amazing team is working so hard to bring Lost in Limbo to life, and they need your support to make it happen.
