Cosmic Star Heroine announced

Robert Boyd of Zeboyd Games has written to me to announce a new sci-fi jRPG by the name of Cosmic Star Heroine. (If “Zeboyd Games” sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the two-man team that brought us the quite successful  indie jRPGs Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World.)

The premise of this latest title:

Alyssa L’Salle is one of the galactic government’s top agents and always manages to save the day! But when she accidentally uncovers a dark conspiracy, her own government outs her as a legendary spy and the people’s champion! Sure, now she has hordes of adoring fans but every villainous organization she’s ever crossed in her career knows who she is and is out for her blood! Can she save the day once more while she faces her greatest challenge… Everyone!?

Cosmic Star Heroine is being created in Unity, with 2D pixel art visuals, visible enemy patrols, battles that take place on the exploration screen, and multi-character combo abilities. Zeboyd is clearly drawing some inspiration from Chrono Trigger here in terms of the mechanics, but Robert Boyd assures me that there won’t be any time travel–they don’t want to draw too close a comparison, after all.

Another intriguing detail: “Players will be able to customize their own spy headquarters by recruiting more agents (think the Suikoden series).”

There isn’t too much to show yet beyond the main character concept art in the top-right, but Zeboyd have a good track record and I expect this one will be worth keeping an eye on.

According to Boyd, they’ll be running a Kickstarter campaign later this year to help float development costs (which include building a new engine as they transition from XNA to Unity, as well as producing larger, higher quality sprites than they used in prior titles). Boyd informs me that their titles generally take 8-10 months to develop; Cosmic Star Heroine is tentatively planned for release in the second half of 2014.