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From Robinhood to MMO – How Pahdo Labs’ Starlight Re:Volver came to life

Originally posted on Video Games on SI | By Oliver Brandt | Last updated Dec 5, 2024 11:52 AM ET

Game development is difficult. It’s even more difficult when you’re starting from scratch with no history or experience in the field. Normally, in this scenario, you’d start small — a tiny, low-budget, single-player game that you can get out relatively quickly. What you don’t do, typically, is build an online multiplayer action RPG with a huge social element, mixing the best parts of Hades and Diablo with Korean MMOs like MapleStory. Pahdo Labs founder Daniel Zou isn’t a typical guy, and Pahdo’s first game, the anime-inspired Starlight Re:Volver, promises to be all of that and more.

Zou has spent most of his career as a software engineer, working primarily for financial technology companies. A quick look at his LinkedIn page shows a work history that doesn’t exactly scream “game developer,” but Zou grew up with games, and even fooled around with making games in his youth.

“I sort of played around in terms of making games in middle school and high school,” Zou tells GLHF. “It was nothing professional. I started by using tools like RPG Maker, I spent many hours on those, and I also had my own modded Minecraft server.”

After a brief stint making Flash games, he put games behind him and moved into technology. Video games had sparked an interest in technology, and financial technology let him use that interest to get ahead in the world. After half a decade in fintech, the allure of games became too enticing to ignore, so he decided it was time to make a game.

Right from the start, Zou knew that his skillset wasn’t particularly suited to making games. He knew that he had no relevant experience in implementation or design, but he did have a starting point, and it’s one that most game developers say is the last thing you want to start with.

“The very first prototypes for Pahdo were very simple pixel art-based games where there wasn’t too much in terms of action, but all of them had real time multiplayer,” Zou recalls. “They say with game development, you don’t want to start with real time multiplayer, but that was the thing I was most comfortable with.

“It was the thing that I was most sure I could do based on my experience. I worked at Robinhood, and Robinhood is just about the synchronization of things in real time — so you can see your portfolio and the latest prices and so on. So I knew that I could make a real time multiplayer game.”

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Pahdo’s earliest prototypes were “a remix of Among Us,” with RPG-style classes — a more simple 2D experience that still focused on real time multiplayer. Zou knew that he didn’t have the skills to transition into 3D games alone, so he started building out a team of talented individuals from across the industry, including former Capcom, Riot Game, and Microsoft employees. One of those employees was Alijah Ladd, a former Capcom and Ubisoft employee who now acts as the creative director of Starlight Re:Volver.

“The very first email Dan sent to me, he just wanted to get some feedback and advice about the project and design,” Ladd says. “I think I ignored that email because I was just really busy. [Pahdo was] a new company, I didn’t know what they were working on, I didn’t know anything about them other than I had a friend who worked there.

“But later on, he reached out again, and I think all it took was one conversation for me to be seriously interested in what he was doing and to realize ‘Oh, this isn’t just another startup doomed to fail, I think they actually really have something here.’”

As more people joined and connections were made, more doors opened up. When development started on Starlight Re:Volver, Alijah and the team at Pahdo made a mood board to capture the tone and feel of what they wanted to achieve. One employee at Pahdo noted that a piece of artwork that was on the board was from somebody they knew, and offered to set up a meeting with her — that artist went on to be the game’s art director, and from there, the studio grew through what Ladd describes as a “positive snowball effect.”

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With a solid core team and a clear direction, Pahdo entered full-blown development on Starlight Re:Volver. Fast forward a few years, and with just a few months until an Early Access release, the game looks absolutely massive in scope. There’s real time co-operative combat dungeon crawling, a social hub with player interaction, fishing minigames, and so much more. If you can believe it, this is actually the pared-back version of the game the studio started making back in 2021.

“I think the game we have now is the distillation of the best parts and the strengths of the even more overscoped ideas that we had before,” Zou tells us between chuckles. “In that sense, we’re not as worried. I think we’re very confident that we can deliver on what we’re selling here.”

Ladd agrees, adding that the fantastic trailer you see above has set a very high bar for the studio — but he’s confident that the game will feel complete at launch and grow bigger and better over time.

“We’re definitely pushing ourselves with this project to create something really wonderful, but also we want this game to grow over time. We want a complete-feeling launch experience, that’s really important to us with our early access, but we also know that that’s just the beginning. We don’t necessarily have to have all these features on day one, we just want it to feel complete on day one, and then we want it to feel even more rich and robust over time.”

This article first appeared on Video Games on SI and was syndicated with permission.

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