The God Slayer: Interview – Steam-Punk Fantasy & Divine Rebellion

Following a brief preview of The God Slayer, we had several questions for the team at Pathea Games. While a direct recording of our Discord conversation wasn’t possible, the developers and representatives at Pathea graciously arranged an exclusive mini-interview to address our inquiries. A full transcript of the discussion with Ivan Karadzhov, Senior Marketing & PR Manager at Pathea Games, is available below.

Q: What real-world inspirations shaped the world of The God Slayer, and why was now the right time to develop it?

Karadzhov: The God Slayer is quite different from Pathea’s well-known My Time series. However, like the My Time games, it’s fundamentally an open-world role-playing game. So, in a sense, The God Slayer builds upon the experience we gained creating those titles.

After developing several relaxing and cheerful games, our team wanted to explore something more mature and darker. The My Time series has been fantastic for us—it’s something our studio genuinely enjoys working on—but there were limitations in storytelling, as the endings always needed to be positive. Technically, we weren’t able to allow players to kill characters. We tried it once, and there was significant backlash, forcing us to implement a rescue mechanic.

So, when we began brainstorming our next project, most of the developers expressed a desire to tackle a larger, more complex narrative. We decided that if we were going to create a more mature game, we should pursue a direction that hadn’t been widely explored. We looked around and found a relative lack of Asian steampunk fantasy settings in open-world games. That’s when we decided to create something unique.

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We drew inspiration from the aesthetics of the Ming Dynasty, imagining what would happen if they had developed steam technology centuries later. Honestly, when we searched for reference material for Asian steampunk designs, there wasn’t much available. This made the process challenging, but from a developer’s perspective, it’s incredibly rewarding to create a world that no one has seen before—a world that people can discover and enjoy for the first time. This approach to world-building is becoming increasingly common as developers seek to offer players truly novel experiences.

Q: Many games that involve defeating gods or powerful beings often portray the player as removing something essential from the world, like in Shadow of the Colossus. How does The God Slayer convey the weight of killing these deities?

Karadzhov: That’s a very insightful question. In our story, the celestial beings—these god-like entities—created the human world and all living things with the purpose of cultivating Qi energy from the human population to sustain their immortality. But humans, being humans, decided to harness this Qi energy and manifest it as elemental powers. These individuals became known as Spirit Weavers.

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The gods were deeply displeased with this development and retaliated, seeking to reassert their control. They conquered the Zhou Kingdom—the most powerful nation in the land. The King and many of the kingdom’s Spirit Weavers were hunted down and killed. This day became known as “The Godfall.” Our protagonist and his entire family were slain by the celestial beings during this event.

Therefore, he is driven by a desire to avenge his family and liberate the people, fueled by both grief and a sense of justice. From our perspective, the celestial gods aren’t benevolent deities—they are essentially exploiting humanity as a resource, as a farm for Qi energy. So, when you kill them, you aren’t removing something sacred from the world. You are freeing people from those who treat them as livestock.

The game’s structure revolves around different chapters, with most culminating in a battle against a celestial being—a bottleneck. When you defeat a god, the world reacts. New stories unfold, and society changes with your actions. There’s weight to this, but it’s a weight of justice and retribution, not loss.

Q: The God Slayer features combat utilizing different elements. Can players specialize in a particular element, and how does the player’s created character impact the world around them outside of combat?

Karadzhov: We have five elements—fire, water, earth, metal, and wood—that you can combine in various ways. The core concept is that you can create your own martial arts style, combining your own combos with a DIY-style system. It works as you’d expect from a natural environment perspective. For example, if you see water, you can attack it with fire, and it will evaporate into steam. You can create tornadoes with water and then use earth to create rocks to crush enemies. There are many ways to interact with the elemental forces.

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Players can choose to focus on a specific element or balance them. Of course, from a game design perspective, we want players to experiment with mixing and matching, as that’s where it truly shines—unexpected things happen when you combine different elements. Initially, we even considered adding a full physics element—like digging a hole in the ground and filling it with actual volumetric water, causing enemies to drown. But our programmers informed us that optimizing this across all different platforms would be quite difficult, so we abandoned that idea.

But yes, elemental combat is central to tying everything together. You can interact with the world, with characters, and with objects using these abilities. Outside of combat, there are multiple approaches to side quests. For example, you can use elemental powers to start a fire as a distraction or to solve environmental puzzles. If you gather enough resources through exploration, you might be able to bribe characters or find alternative solutions. So, players have a lot of agency in how they handle different situations.

Q: How did you strike a balance between visually stunning presentation and compelling gameplay?

Karadzhov: This has been one of our biggest priorities. We even established our own motion capture studio for this game and brought in a team of martial artists to guide us. Often, we’d go to the motion capture studio and say, “Okay, let’s do a one-versus-five fight. How would that work? How do we frame the camera?”

We watched a lot of Jackie Chan, Jet Li, 80s martial arts films like Enter the Dragon, because pacing is important. In reality, if you’re fighting five opponents, you’ll likely lose because they’ll all gang up on you. But in movies, they focus and zoom in, showing you a one-on-one fight while the other four men stand around doing nothing. They just stand there until the camera stops. So, we learned a lot about maintaining cinematic techniques—that’s where the visual flair comes from.

For us, getting the combat style right was crucial. So, we also looked at many different games, like Spider-Man, Batman, Sifu, The Last Airbender, the cartoon, and the Netflix live-action series. We drew inspiration from many different sources, but we wanted a martial arts game with elemental powers that you can use and interact with. We wanted to ensure the combat felt fluid and rhythmic.

Additionally, we wanted two modes when we started making the game. Story mode will be geared towards the average fantasy player—it won’t be too difficult. We’ll let you get hit, have fun, mash buttons, and still have cool effects. You’ll still have a chance to win the game. For players who want more of a challenge, there’s a challenge mode where enemies hit harder and punish mistakes, so you have to fully experience the depth of the combat system. The visuals need to appeal to everyone, but the difficulty is adjustable.

The God Slayer is currently in development.