In October, the unusual open-world RPG ELEX landed on Steam, PS4, and Xbox One, brought to us by developer Piranha Bytes. It's an old-school role-playing game updated for modern consoles, one that lets you jetpack around a harsh apocalyptic environment.

Piranha Bytes' previous role-playing series Gothic and Risen have found a special foothold in the United States and Europe. Curious about the company's move to a more science fiction-inspired setting, we decided to ask project director Björn Pankratz about the company's development process and how it makes these fascinating, if niche, RPGs. He was kind enough to join us for a Twitch conversation.

We've transcribed some of the more interesting passages of the conversation below.

You can watch the stream embedded above, or click here to see it. And for more developer insights, editor roundtables, and gameplay commentary, be sure to follow the Gamasutra Twitch channel.

STREAM PARTICIPANTS:

Bryant Francis, editor at Gamasutra

Björn Pankratz, project director of ELEX, at Piranha Bytes

Alex Wawro, editor at Gamasutra

On making niche games

"Why are we following our philosophy of making games as we are with such a small team?"

Wawro: Piranha Bytes' games have a reputation for being "hidden gems," cult classics, they have a small but devoted fanbase.

And they have, typically, when I look at critical consensus around your work, I see a lot of concern over buggyness, but I also see a lot of praise, for the creativity, the inventiveness and the scope of the world. I kind of wanted to get your read on that. Is it accurate, and if so, what is it that enables Piranha Bytes to make these sorts of games?

Pankrantz: Hmm. I don't think we have as many bugs as we're told that we have! (others laugh) The question is, why are we following our philosophy of making games as we are with such a small team?

Wawro: That is a fantastic drill-down to what I was getting at. What is it about Piranha Bytes that makes the studio capable of producing these expansive, rollicking, open-world games?

Pankrantz: There were many guys who said, "Here, take my money and make a bigger company!"

Wawro: (laughs) I can believe it!

Pankrantz: But we didn't want that, because when we become bigger the responsibilities will change, and we have not the control of gameplay and things like that. We know that we have many, many fans out there. They expect something from us, exactly that what we do, especially here in ELEX.

And that's our philosophy, we've followed now for about twenty years or something. In Germany, it's not so easy to hold your position as a small developer company here.

Many companies aren't around anymore, but we're still there. There are reasons for that, that we still exist. When you get bigger you have to make more business stuff, controlling and meetings and stuff like that,

Wawro: Busywork? Work for work's sake?

Pankrantz: Yeah. I don't find the word for it. There are too many minds that follow different visions of how a game should be. Many Germans tried to become successful in America. They believe that Americans want to have a very easy game. When you only hit the bottom, you (have to be told) "You're great! You're great!" But I don't think so, with games like, as you said, Dark Souls and such, are very successful in America. That's not the typical American, to want to have an easy game.

In the end it is the matter of the money you spent for it, cutscene quality, quality of animations, graphics and stuff like that. But what we want to do is to tell them a deep story, an interesting thing, a very cool pacing game and immerses you in the world.

And when you want to explain our formula, our philosophy, you have to use more than two sentences to explain that. That was always our problem, what it is to sell about our games.

Making an interesting faction system