Q&A with Shujinkou Director Julian Rice

Recently, we sat down with Julian Rice, director of Shujinkou, to explore the creative and technical journey behind one of 2025’s most ambitious indie efforts. As the debut project from Rice’s team, Shujinkou blends traditional role-playing mechanics, resonant storytelling, and even offers to teach players a bit of Japanese.

Tech-Gaming: Shujinkou might be the single most ambitious indie work of the last decade and as an inaugural outing that’s a massive undertaking. Can you walk us through the development process?

Julian Rice: Thank you for the kind words. I want to answer this one as transparently as possible, because turning Shujinkou from an idea into a full JRPG felt, at times, nearly impossible. When I first had the concept at 19, I didn’t set out thinking, “Let’s make the most ambitious indie game ever.” I was just a university student with a vision and way more passion than practical experience. But that vision quickly became something much larger than I anticipated.

With no industry connections and next to no resources, I started assembling a team from scratch: reviewing over 3,500 applications (over the course of 3 years), interviewing hundreds of candidates, and making decisions based almost entirely on instinct. I had to apologize for driving my roommates out of our room so I could facilitate interviews, and even then, I had to try to convince people 10-20 years older than me to work with me, a college student with no business experience—just a ton of passion and experience playing JRPGs. Indeed worked best for hiring, Discord for communication, and Asana for project management. The original prototype was made in GameMaker Studio 2 before I restarted development in Unity in March 2019.

Initially, I built the game’s world foundation by writing a 200+ page lore document that outlined the world, its six nations, over 100 major characters, and hundreds of musical references for our soundtrack. Some assets created in 2019 weren’t even implemented until 2024! At times, it felt like I was just asking the team to keep churning out assets and trusting that they’d somehow fit later, and while it mostly worked in the end, it definitely wasn’t the most efficient way to develop something this complex. One big mistake was bringing a QA team on so late in 2023. Any developer can probably visualize and gag at the technical debt that had accrued over the years and how degradation tests would work up until launch.

The hardest part was solo-implementing hundreds of important and interlocked features, especially the language-learning systems, without much technical planning or any mentors in the technical space. I had documents for writers and story structure to handle the narrative, but on the engineering side, I had to figure things out as we went. There was no way we would just copy other JRPGs—we needed to design systems that supported language learning AND could be toggled off without compromising the fun. It led to a lot of trial and error, and the result was internal delays. Every year, I thought we were close to release… and every year, we really weren’t.

Compounding all of that was my mother’s stage 4 colon cancer diagnosis in 2018—she was only 46. As the eldest in the family, I really threw myself into the project, hoping to finish it before she passed. We had strong showings at the Tokyo Game Show in 2019 and 2020, but I didn’t make it in time. Even after she passed, my motivation only deepened. Shujinkou became more than just a game. It became a way of life. I know this sounds SUPER cheesy, but I really mean it. Try to imagine it from my perspective: the death clock of the most important woman in my life—the one who gave birth to me and raised me to be who I am—was ticking down, and I couldn’t do anything about it. I poured myself into Shujinkou the same way others binge shows or get hooked on games. It was fun, exhausting, personal, and honestly just plain crazy.

Looking back, there are hundreds of things I could have done differently, but I’m really proud of my younger self for pushing through literally everything to make Shujinkou a reality. I have no regrets. Now, with the experience and knowledge our team has gained, I’m more excited than ever for us to build the second title in the Shujinkou trilogy, and to continue expanding this universe we’ve created.

T-G: Dungeon crawlers aren’t always known for having rich character development. Yet, Shujinkou had some personalities and relationships that are delightfully nuanced. What was the process behind envisaging these characters and the bonds they share?  

JR: For me, I really wanted to tell a grand, character-driven story, one that follows Shu, Jin, and Kou as they journey through a vast fantasy world, forming deep bonds with allies and facing off against a wide range of foes. The story could’ve been told through any number of genres, honestly. Back in 2019, our very first prototype was actually a platformer. It could’ve become an action game, a board game, anything. But my love for games like Etrian Odyssey, SMT, Fire Emblem (especially Awakening and Fates), and Paper Mario ultimately led me to land on a dungeon crawler—with gameplay, art, dialogue, and music direction influenced by those series and others.

Since I was aiming for a longer, emotionally rich story, I leaned more toward the story-heavy side of DRPGs, closer to something like Persona Q or the Etrian Odyssey Untold games, rather than purely stat- or system-focused titles. We moved away from generalized job/class systems and instead built fixed characters with unique personalities, backgrounds, and stat growth tendencies. But unlike those bigger titles, we didn’t have the benefit of a long-established IP or the legacy of a major studio, so it’s definitely been a challenge to get people to notice that Shujinkou is, at its core, a deeply story-driven dungeon crawler, which is still a pretty rare thing.

As for how we built those characters: I started by drafting personality documents that included their backstories, likes, dislikes, motivations, and all the foundational stuff. Then I worked with our writers to create what we called “Situation Banks”—basically massive Google Sheets with dozens of real-life and fictional scenarios. Things like: How does this character react to being flirted with? What would they say if they witnessed a crime? How do they feel about religion, war, or loss? That let us make sure that every m_­ajor character, especially the 40+ characters with dedicated portrait art, felt like they had more than one dimension to them.

I think it really shines with the six Fuu Lobby partners: Kiyo, Sugi, Tatiana, Otogawa, Tsunako, and Hina. Their Kizuna (bonding) arcs gave us room to explore those deeper layers, and it’s been really rewarding seeing fans connect with those relationships.

T-G: Without spoiling anything, it’s safe to say the plot revolves around the Akuma, creatures that devour language and everything that comes with it. Can you talk about the inspiration for that rather Orwellian concept?

JR: I wanted the story to feel unique while still being grounded in classic JRPG storytelling, otherwise we would risk alienating our core audience. Since a major part of the game’s mechanics revolves around language learning, it felt natural to have the first arc, Genya, focus on the Akuma and their ability to devour language.

We see a lot of games these days set in dystopian societies shaped by things like human greed, plagues, aliens, monsters, environmental collapse, or unchecked technological advancement. But I think people overlook just how critical language is to society. Highlighting the aftereffects of a world losing its language and exploring how characters try to adapt or fight back, offered us a fresh narrative direction you don’t often see in games.

That said, the overarching story of Shujinkou is inspired by long-running anime and manga like One Piece or Naruto. The Akuma are front and center in Genya, but a completely different issue arises in the second arc, Sabaku. The resolution of that arc not only gives players more insight into the Akuma’s origins and motives, but also leads directly into the third arc—which will be part of the second title in the trilogy.

By the time players reach the sixth and final nation, all the chess pieces will be on the board. They can expect a massive climax that ties everything together and resolves each major character’s arc. The final segment will feature Law, Chaos, and Neutral endings, giving players meaningful agency in how the Shujinkou saga concludes for them. These endings were planned back in 2019, when I first started outlining the story. Now, like a mangaka, it is just a matter of time and more hard work to bring that vision to life.

T-G: For better or worse, we live in the era of episodic entertainment that’s habitually broken down into digestible bits. Yet, Shujinkou is a true epic, with two tales that offer as much breadth and depth as a pair of standalone RPGs. Was there ever a consideration of splitting the arcs up?

JR: Did you know that when we first started developing the game, we were working on all six story arcs at once? It sounds crazy in hindsight—completely infeasible—but I was young, full of drive, and surrounded by a passionate, committed team.

At the time, I was funding the project out of pocket with savings from university jobs, then did so while working full-time as a software engineer. My mother was battling stage 4 cancer, and the yen was steadily weakening, so even with salary increases, it felt like I was falling behind. In the middle of all that, my father suggested breaking the project into a trilogy, with two nation arcs available per title. Given the scope of this new IP and the reality of our limited resources, it quickly became clear that he was right. I made the call and never looked back.

While finalizing the Genya and Sabaku arcs, there were moments when I wondered whether we should have split the launch into two separate titles. We’re still not far enough post-release to say for sure whether launching both together was a business misstep. But creatively, I think both arcs hold their own as individual stories, and they tie together in a way that’s genuinely compelling. I do think we may revisit how we release the game when it comes to the Nintendo Switch, but that really depends on how everything works out.

Even now, I believe the dialogue, raw emotion, and that overwhelming sensation of leaving home to “adventure abroad,” especially in the bridge between the two arcs, rivals, and maybe even surpasses, some of the most powerful moments I’ve experienced in my favorite games. I’m deeply grateful to my artists, composers, writers, and testers for helping turn that vision into something real—something that can emotionally impact players around the world.

T-G: Building on that, Shujinkou is the first part of a planned trilogy, which is a momentous undertaking. How much of the exhibition and dialog has been completed?

JR: As mentioned earlier, the team and I were developing all six nations simultaneously during the early stages of production. The second part of the saga focuses on the third and fourth nations, each with their own story arc. The third and final part will then explore the fifth and sixth nations, ultimately bringing the entire Shujinkou saga to a decisive conclusion.

In terms of progress, we’ve already drafted the fourth nation’s story arc, along with most of the dialogue for its new protagonists and antagonists. Some progress has also been made on the third nation’s arc, but I’ll be going back to the drawing board with my writers and artists. Now that we’ve gained more experience and have a much better understanding of what resonated with players and what didn’t, we’re looking at how to refine or reimagine elements that were originally planned years ago.

This also opens the door to integrating entirely new features and mechanics, and improving existing aspects like UI, art style cohesion, accessibility, and more. Based on what we’ve planned so far, combined with our growth as a team and the resources now available to us, I genuinely believe players are going to be surprised and excited by what we’re building. The third nation is a futuristic metropolis in a snowy landscape—an intentional contrast to the more traditional, low-tech world of Shu’s home nation and Sabaku, the second nation included in this year’s release. I think that shift is going to really wow players in the second part!

T-G: Shujinkou has one of the most exquisite soundtracks of any game this year. Can you tell us about how that materialized?

JR: Of course! I’ve always believed that music is one of the most critical elements in a video game. Over a decade after finishing games like Fire Emblem: Awakening, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, and 7^th Dragon III Code: VFD, I still listen to their soundtracks every week. The emotional resonance those scores carry and how they instantly trigger memories and nostalgia played a huge role in shaping my love for those franchises. So, when I founded Rice Games in late 2018, one of the very first people I looked to bring on board were passionate composers.

Through a rigorous and fully remote hiring process, I was fortunate to find and bond with a team of incredibly talented composers who believed in the scale and spirit of this vision. Instead of going the route of many indie titles that feature a single composer (which can also be amazing!), I wanted Shujinkou’s soundtrack to reflect the combined creative force of multiple artists—just like many large-scale JRPGs do (Pokémon, Fire Emblem, and others). The result is a massive 158-track, seven-hour soundtrack spanning a wide range of genres, featuring dozens of live musicians (including myself—I played violin on the Fuu Lobby track!), and built with the hope that its melodies will stay with players long after the credits roll.

I also want to give a huge shoutout to the wonderful and hard-working composers who poured years of their lives into this project. On our Western team, our lead composer Brian LaGuardia handled the game’s emotional main theme “Shujinkou” and wrote the most music overall. He also crafted the most intense orchestral boss themes “Tsuki no Shizuku” and “Sekai ga Owattemo”, as well as much of the environment and combat music for Shu’s homeland, Genya. Robert Mullis brought energy to the rock-infused battle tracks like “Noyama (Battle)” and wrote several dialogue themes like “Mealtime” that helped breathe life into our 1.5-million-word script. And Frank Tedesco, honestly the most gifted pianist I’ve ever met, composed standouts like “Battle in the Heat,” “Tsuri,” and “Mugen’s Theme.” He also composed the music you hear in our recent Post Launch trailer.

On our Eastern team, Ryo Noguchi led with sophisticated yet catchy pieces like “Fuu Lobby,” “Genya Kaikou (Night),” “Battle vs Fuku,” and “Kou’s Theme.” Masaki Takao contributed essential dialogue tracks like “Kanakae Theme” and “Strategy,” while Kana Kitada gave us high-energy battle bangers like “Battle vs Maroya” and calm arrangements like “A Princess’s Solemnity.” I still can’t believe this was her debut game—her work blew us away. I personally contributed a couple tracks, like the two tracks that play when a Yajuu chases the player, but compared to what our music team created, my role on the music composition front was very minor.

We may not have the razor-sharp musical cohesion you see in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 or Nier: Automata, or the sweeping live orchestral power that is seen in AAA titles like Monster Hunter: Wilds and Final Fantasy XVI, but I genuinely believe Shujinkou’s soundtrack taps into something every JRPG fan craves: a rich and diverse range of sounds. From Japanese fusion jazz to soaring orchestral tracks, traditional eastern pentatonic scales to music inspired by the Middle East, and guitar shredding that you may expect to hear in Persona, Ys, or the Trails series, there’s a little bit of something for everyone. Of course, that level of variety means we lose a bit of the thematic consistency you might find in more musically unified titles, but in many ways, that variety is a hallmark of classic JRPGs, and it’s something I’m really proud we embraced.

And the best part? Several tracks for Parts 2 and 3 of the Shujinkou trilogy were already composed during development, so fans can look forward to even more musical highlights from this incredible team in the future. For now, you can listen to the 158-track Shujinkou OST on Spotify. We will share more details about the OST coming to Steam and other platforms as a paid release in the future.

T-G: Notably, Shujinkou can teach you quite a bit of Japanese, if you’re interested. How did the inclusion of language learning within the game first develop?

JR: It actually started with a kind of random eureka moment—the realization that the Japanese word Shujinkou (“protagonist”) is made up of three kanji, each with its own meaning and nuance. That led me to imagine three main characters: Shu, Jin, and Kou, each representing a piece of that word, both literally and thematically. That little spark got me thinking about how language could play a meaningful role in both the gameplay and the story. At the time, I was a junior at UCLA, double majoring in Linguistics & Computer Science and Japanese, with a minor in Entrepreneurship. I think that mélange of studies, plus my personal interests in both language, role-playing, and entrepreneurship naturally led to the creation of a new video game studio and the idea of blending JRPG storytelling with interactive, but optional language learning.

parents initially encouraged me to join a studio first and build up experience before trying something this ambitious, I felt like the idea behind Shujinkou was too unique and exciting to sit on. I kept working hard at it after graduating in 2020 while working full-time as a Full Stack Engineer at BizReach Inc. in Tokyo, and the more progress we made, the more I believed this concept could become something truly special. Looking back, I think the game is a result of that intersection between my academic interests and creative passions, and the language component is just one of the ways we tried to make Shujinkou stand out in a meaningful way.

T-G: It’s now been four months since Shujinkou was released. What types of changes and adjustments have emerged from player feedback?

JR: We’ve been paying close attention and have internally listed out dozens of quality-of-life features that fans have requested, along with recurring issues voiced by both players and critics online. As of the release of our most recent Post Launch trailer and Patch v1.39, we’ve addressed and implemented nearly every significant issue or feature request that has come our way.

Three of the biggest quality-of-life improvements include:

1. Items sold at any shop can now be used universally for forging, cooking, item trading with NPCs, and quest-related tasks.
2. Players can now accept more quests at once thanks to an increased quest limit, and they can jump straight to the requester if the requester is available in the town.
3. A new Quick Travel menu has been added in towns, allowing players to jump between key locations and navigate towns more easily.

We have also made several smaller, but important additions. These include faster sprinting and camera rotation, improved equipment ordering in shops (strongest to weakest instead of the reverse), checkmarks on the map for signboards that have already been viewed, smoother transitions in labyrinths when the time-of-day changes, and expanded language features. Players can now press L3 to instantly toggle English-only mode at any time and also use R3 to cycle between four language display options: Default (player settings), Japanese, Furigana, Romaji, and English.

Just this past week, we’ve received requests from players in our Discord community to be able to toggle individual language displays within the R3 cycle—for example, being able to choose to disable Romaji and English when cycling with R3. We are aiming to get that feature out within the next week or two.

On the narrative side, we’ve fixed several typos and minor dialogue issues. We’ve also trimmed down tutorials by cutting unnecessary text and slides, and we’ve removed redundant dialogue in certain labyrinths that was slowing down gameplay flow. The team and I are always listening to complaints and the negative experiences players may have had with the game, and only want for Shujinkou to be as accessible and enjoyable for as many people as possible. We do understand that, no matter what we do or add, there will always be players who just don’t vibe with our game, and that is completely fine with us. We’ll continue monitoring player feedback as we continue development with the Nintendo Switch port and begin laying the groundwork for future projects in the Shujinkou universe.

T-G: As an indie developer, what have been some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced during production, with marketing, and post-release?

JR: Building a new franchise like Shujinkou independently has come with dozens of massive challenges. With a young, passionate team, including myself, none of whom had shipped a commercial game of this scale before, we’ve had to lean heavily on instinct rather than data when making creative decisions. Fortunately, a lot of those gut calls paid off, but there were definitely a few missteps on my end as director that I will learn from and improve on in future titles.

On the production side, one of the biggest hurdles has been interfacing with major platforms like Steam, Sony, and Nintendo (which we’re still working on) to understand their SDKs, development kits, and internal processes around publishing, marketing assets, and partner support. Making a game like Shujinkou work from a technical and gameplay standpoint over six years was already a huge challenge and feat, but navigating the business side felt like being a small shrimp in a sea of whales and sharks. Most of the studios we’re trying to “compete” with have decades of experience, perfected operation pipelines, and the resources to properly launch games at scale, and that difference is something we’ve definitely felt—especially because Shujinkou is a big indie JRPG with a premium price tag, aiming to stand alongside industry giants in terms of content, quality, and ambition. Luckily, a few of the critics who have played through and reviewed both story arcs have praised the storytelling and how it rivals what larger studios have put out in recent times.

Marketing is probably our weakest component right now, and this is the case for a couple of reasons. Given the background of this game and how it has been such a serious part of my life, I still feel like haphazardly hiring “just some” marketing studio to help wouldn’t do the game justice, but I personally don’t have all the know-how, time, and ideas to get our social media filled with some of the hundreds of memorable moments seen in Shujinkou’s story. We have tried contacting dozens of small and medium-sized streamers who may be interested in playing or streaming Shujinkou, but the average response rate is low enough that it can be tiring to consistently send follow-ups. Finally, I do feel that relatively speaking, the DRPG genre doesn’t seem to be the strongest game genre for streaming. I also think that the fact that the game facilitates language learning still acts as a turn off for a large portion of gamers, even though all the learning is completely optional. We will make sure to adjust our outward wording for future marketing efforts!

Post-release, the biggest challenge has been continuously monitoring for fatal crashes or bugs and resolving them as quickly as possible. My fastest turnaround so far has been pushing out a working hotfix in under two hours after it was triggered and an error report was automatically generated on our end. During the critic review phase and right after launch, I even asked my QA team to phone me directly if any new, fatal errors appeared in our error logs. It felt like being an on-call engineer 24/7.

There were a few brutal nights, but one that still sticks with me happened around 1 AM—right as I was heading to bed before the start of a new week (Monday!) and my 10:30 AM full-time engineering job. A bizarre, PS5-specific visual bug was reported: distorted RGB artifacts all over the second labyrinth. I immediately got out of bed and worked through the night, rebuilding the game over and over until I was in a half-asleep state at 10:15 AM, when I had to switch gears and leave my home to head over to my day job. As one of the few mood makers at my day job, I had to bring my high energy and “Genki“ vibes, and fortunately it all worked out. I ended up pushing a temporary fix after work and, after a week or two, was able to trace the issue to its root cause, which helped prevent similar bugs from appearing again.

T-G: Despite the rather fantastical setting, Shujinkou makes quite a few allusions to other games and popular culture elements. What was the motivation behind the inclusion?

JR: I think most pieces of entertainment, whether it’s games, film, or music, carry the DNA of the works that came before them. While originality is important, inspiration is natural and inevitable. Etrian Odyssey, for example, is a unique DRPG series with one of the most addicting mapping and battle systems out there. But even it draws lineage from things like Dungeons & Dragons and older dungeon crawlers before it. I think this is part of what makes game development a rich, evolving tradition.

With Shujinkou, we definitely wanted to create something new and personal, especially through our seamless language-learning system and character-driven story. But it was never about reinventing everything from scratch. Instead, our approach was to take the things the team and I loved: classic JRPGs, character bonding systems, stylized UI, complex and strategic combat—and build something that paid tribute to those influences while ensuring it had its own identity. If you asked the team and me to list every game that had some conscious or subconscious impact on Shujinkou, I bet you that we could easily name over a hundred.

One last thing I do in this interview is to clarify the comparisons of Shujinkou to DRPGs like Etrian Odyssey. I’ve seen some fans get a bit defensive when Shujinkou is compared favorably to it. Our intention was never to replace or “outdo” Etrian Odyssey. The reality is, I loved that series SO much that I ended up spending six years making a game that was partially inspired by it, but still very different in its focus and execution. I hope DRPG and JRPG fans in general can see that we’re all part of the same team, and that my team and I are simply trying to make something meaningful and long-lasting for players, just like the developers who inspired us did. Thank you for your understanding—I promise you that everyone at Rice Games is friendly, super chill, and dope!