Selatria - A retrospective/post-mortem: Part 3
The development of Selatria was long and tumultuous. It became a long running joke from circles I was in on how long it was going to take to complete the game. It took 13 years, 6 months, and 29 days to complete the game, or 4959 days in total.
Selatria changed my life, and opened up a lot of doors and networking opportunities into software and game development careers. But it was far from perfect, and I wanted to write this not only for others, who may have a dream game they're thinking of doing but not realize how difficult it may be for them, but for myself to see how far I've come.
For veterans of the game industry, some of these points might seem like they're obvious, but these pointers and tips may be useful for someone who is thinking about making their dream game from the get-go.
You can read Part 0 here.
You can read Part 1 here.
You can read Part 2 here.
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A 13-year development cycle
Selatria took 13 years to develop, and a lot of it is attributed to working on the game out of order with no traditional planning. I joke that we beat Duke Nukem Forever, but only barely, and without changing game engines.
Did I want to make games? Yes. Did I know how difficult/long the process was going to be? Absolutely not. I was hoping the game would be completed in August 2012. 12 years before it was actually completed.
Having planning tools, weekly meetings, and sticking to deadlines was what ultimately got the game done. The first few years where we were going Gung-Ho were the most satisfying I had creating content for Selatria, but it doesn't mean anything if it's not going towards any direction or goal to get it actually done.
It took two years to start having a semblance of timeline and planning and I'm too stubborn of a person to abandon or scope down.
I try and hold myself and other directors in the industry to what I couldn't do, so that timelines can be met, even if it means cutting aspects of the game to make it work.
"Everybody prefers to have 100% of the 80% than 80% of nothing." - Plastic SCM Manual
Thank you to HackNPlan and Plastic SCM (now Unity Version Control) for helping keep me accountable.
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Crowdfunding
For Selatria's development, we had two attempts at crowdfunding for the game. We were originally inspired in the studio by seeing similar successes with other games who were able to raise tens of thousands of dollars. During this time, crowdfunding was a relatively new concept, and people were able to attach big names and get these big names in the industry by showing concept art and early animation.
Selatria for the first couple of years had an issue with a clashing and inconsistent art style, and the clash between the visual styles caused the project to not gel together. We launched our first attempt at Indiegogo in 2013 and my lack of confidence showed in the presentation. I unconsciously put the character's expressions in a frustrated/sad state because that was the state I was feeling about the project.
Selatria on Indiegogo: Crowdfunding First Attempt (2013 - Collect whatever is raised)
Even today looking back, I don't think it was a bad art style. If the whole game, down to the sprites, monster art, and terrain was done in a consistent art style in this style, I feel like Selatria could have had a really interesting and unique art direction that would have set it apart. Unfortunately, we didn't have the time, money, and budget to change the whole game around like that.
Our go at Indiegogo only raised $700 for the project and got 12 backers, the majority of that money being from family or friends. This approach didn't work, and we had to take the game literally back to the drawing board.
Enter Niko, who I met through the IGDA Los Angeles, we brought him onto the team to change things around and develop the game in a consistent art style that worked with the art assets we were already using. And he kept the "no nose" design that we have to this day.
During this time, I got a tech job in Orange County that required a brutal one way 1.5 hour commute. After four months of working at this job, we tried a second crowdfunding campaign as a means for me to try and leave the soul-sucking tech job and try and do this full time. This time we tried Kickstarter and with Niko's art style to see if we would have more success.
Selatria on Kickstarter: Crowdfunding Second Attempt (December 2024, All or Nothing)
With Kickstarter, we did have more success than our Indiegogo attempt, but still we only made it about halfway to our goal. Looking back, I still think we may have done Kickstarter a bit too early, given that people's frustrations with other kickstarters not delivering on their promises, and I developed this second go out of desperation of wanting to get out of my day tech job at the time and not necessarily because the game was ready.
I also underestimated the power of the U shaped contributions when it comes to fundraising or crowdfunding. The biggest contributions are always going to come at the beginning and the end, no matter when it is. I don't recommend that anyone extend the life of the crowdfunding campaign thinking it would mean more time for them to contribute. My advice would be to start a little bit after a payday (maybe 1-2 days after the start of a month) and end a few days after the next payday. That gives an opportunity for people to contribute during the start of the campaign, and allow you to do a FOMO-campaign near the end.
The failure of two crowdfunding campaigns could have been a sign that this game wasn't working, but I didn't give up, and even if I could go back in time and told my past self to give up on the project, I wouldn't have listened to me either.
After the Kickstarter failed, we made a decision to split the whole game into two halves to try and raise money for development. I partially regret doing this, and I'll talk a bit about why in the next section.
As for the day job, the failure of the Kickstarter really contributed to the burnout I was feeling with said commute, and I quit that commute and day job exactly two weeks after, while I looked into what was next. Between the job/people there taking its mental toll on me, and the disappointment of the failure from the crowdfunding, I had a breakdown and then took a step back to re-evaluate the next step of Selatria, my mental health, and my career at the time.
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Releasing on Digital Outlets / Steam Greenlight
After the failure of our crowdfunding campaigns, the next step was to take Selatria somewhere where people could purchase the game, we set our eyes on Steam.
Throughout Selatria's early development, getting on Steam was not as easy as it is today. There existed a community service called Greenlight that developers had to apply their games through, where the community voted on which games would get greenlit and accessible on Steam.
Back then, I did not think Selatria would ever get greenlit through this service, so we looked for a loophole, bypassing Steam Greenlight through a prominent verified publisher that publishes RPG Maker games on Steam.
After scoping out half the game, and working with this publisher, we were able to get the first half of Selatria bypassed through Steam Greenlight and released on Steam on February 3, 2017 as Selatria: Advent of the Dakk'rian Empire which currently sits as a 73% Very Positive rating on Steam.
Only a few months after we went through all of this, Valve made the decision to retire Greenlight and allow everyone to submit their games to Steam directly.
One problem though is because of all of this, we were still tied to our previous publisher, who we felt was discounting our game to unsustainable levels, less than a dollar for a copy of Selatria: Advent of the Dakk'rian Empire. We were getting positive reviews, but only an extremely small share of revenue, cut further by our grandfathered revenue share agreement we made with people who worked on the game. I talk a bit more about profit sharing and why that's a bad idea in Part 1.
Because of this, by the end of the year, we figured out how to use Steamworks SDK on our own and took over publishing of Selatria: Advent of the Dakk'rian Empire the following year, and swore off publishers... for a while.
I do regret how this partnership ended, I feel a lapse in communication and reasoning from our publisher on why things went they did would have maybe helped save that relationship.
I do have a guess that the low price made it an accessibility point for people to get their hands on the game and game the algorithm to having the game appear on more lists and getting those necessary reviews quicker. While Selatria: Advent of the Dakk'rian Empire enjoys that Very Positive rating, the full release struggles with getting the 10 ratings it needs to have a Steam rating, and that greatly hurt our visibility and sales. For future games, we are planning on seeking a publisher to share this, as the sales from someone with a stronger marketing arm greatly outweigh going at it alone.
So while I had a sentiment for a while that "all publishers are evil", I no longer think this way, and think they're mandatory if you ever have a shot of a game being more than a teardrop in the ocean.
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For Selatria, we didn't design or program the game with localization in mind. I wish we did. By the time we realized what impact that would do on visibility and sales, it was too late to go back. Everything was hard coded in. From the dialogue, to just about everything.
I didn't learn this lesson with Spellbearers either. With Delivery Issues and on, we plan on supporting multiple languages to release in more territories and get the game into the hands of as many players as possible.
The industry standard for western releases is EFIGS. (English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish) - and there's a big market growing for Brazilian Portuguese. Japanese, Korean, and Simplified Chinese are languages to consider translating your game to as well if budget allows for it.
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Cut Content (Including Selatria Spoilers, Read at your own Risk)
Selatria had a lot of things we ended up cutting/re-arranging during the course of development. I had to dig out old notes and discarded boxed away stuff to find some of this. Please note this has some spoilers.
* The game was originally 12 chapters long. Then cut to 9 once we figured out the middle sections were too weak, and then landed on the current 6.
* The boss at the top of the Availian Gatehouse was originally going to be a Wind Dragon, but was changed to the current slime boss when we gave dragons a deeper lore in the game's world.
* There was originally going to be an Pokémon like HM system dependent on characters in your party. Like for example, if Mage was in the party, he could melt icicles blocking the path, or Number 016 could open locked chests. We couldn't think of engaging ways to keep all the characters involved actively, and so we scrapped it in favor of the dungeon mechanics themselves.
* The Team Attack system ended up being only a small fraction of the system that actually made it into the game. There were lots of plans to include "Chain #" graphics and to keep the damage going out indefinitely, but there are a few reasons why this didn't work. The game would end up being a bit too easy.
* Originally, the Team Attack battle system used separate slots for every spell that was being used, and it bloated the database so much that we were running out of room to design interesting boss mechanics and encounters. Jon Dishaw came in and resigned the system to use existing spells by the characters with a "Team Attack: " prefix added on to make it a bit easier on the database. Even with these changes, we almost maxed the amount of 999 slots we were allowed in the game engine.
* Several moves and abilities were cut because they were redundant or too overpowered. Number 016 originally had this Triple Stab ability that had a cascading effect that looked really cool. It was only a minimal gain over her default double attacks against her limited ability point pool.
* Harmony's abilities had to be re-designed several times because we couldn't find a way to make them fun. Saewo was also such a pain to design for that he got his own section back in Part 1, we wanted to have a fistfighter/summoner/pet system in the game, but it took a lot to make that happen, including a lot of scrapped concepts and abilities.
* The characters were originally given generic titles, like "Mage" "Knight" "Old Man" "Assassin" and "Goblin" to where the player could rename each of the characters, like Final Fantasy VI and VII. We kept this decision through voice acting, but then it became too off-putting to keep all of the characters as generic as they were, so everyone except "Mage" was changed. I wanted Mage to have a simplistic one syllable name, similar to "Link", "Cloud", or "Squall", and I did have a few fights with the team to keep that.
* Luis was originally meant to be a temporary character. He'd help you with one dungeon and then go back to living his NPC life. We liked River Kanoff's performance so much for the character that we turned him into a full character and wrote him into the rest of the game as comic relief. That's a decision that we would have only made back then, and I think River's performance and Luis as a character really helped elevate some of the weaker parts of the game. Don, who took over cutscenes from me in chapter 4, had a lot of fun with the movements and scenes for the character.
* The original class name for Mage was "Spellbearer". We ended up using that title for another game for ours when "Spellbreak" was already taken.
* The design of Number 016 was originally going to be a happy-cutesy assassin (and a lot younger), but we changed her to be a dry/cold assassin, and Harmony was developed to offset that.
* "Knight" was changed to "Melodia" when we came up with names, but we settled on "Melanie" after we made the decision to add "Harmony" to the game as a character who knows music.
* I personally regret Chapter 3-1's multiple paths to get in the castle. Having three ways with two the player may never see cost a lot of time and effort to develop three dungeons and minigames. It also made designing/meeting Harmony difficult because one of those paths involves meeting her, so meeting her again later in the story had two paths based on what you did in Chapter 3-1. If there's branching paths in future games, the player will need to do them all, as opposed to pick them and ignore serious content.
* Shopkeeper was originally designed to optionally die in multiple parts of the story. It would be up to player decision to keep him alive, and they would be awarded an achievement if the player kept him alive all the way to the end of the game. I was motivated to change this after watching Voltron: Legendary Defender on Netflix and learning about the understandably overwhelming negative reception to the "bury your gays" trope with one of the characters. I was previously ignorant to this trope, and I took a few months to re-write and re-program all of Shopkeeper's scenes to have him stay alive no matter what crazy circumstance he is given, and I think the game and the Shopkeeper character came out a LOT better for it. It also forced me to take a look at the negative reinforcement we were doing to the game in general, and my game design philosophy now leads more into rewarding the player for making good choices as opposed to punishing them for making bad choices.
* Shopkeeper was originally going to have a wife, but we changed the gender, re-wrote, and re-designed the character to be the owner of the Availian Item Shop, and he tends to the shop while Shopkeeper gets money from his travels.
* The original design for Chapter 4 involved going through the main port of Dakk'rund, now Port Redden, and have the player going through the Endless Desert first, then going south to Verwin. We ended up changing the order once we figured it was too much of a tease to have the player constantly going around the Caeranth'al Imperial Palace, and having Number 016 separated for more than one chapter would severely hamper game balance.
* We had a lot of trouble integrating the Rashau Mines. The original idea of the minecart was to have a Donkey Kong Country meets Super Mario RPG platforming element of racing through the mines, but the engine made it extremely laggy, and we replaced it with the version you see today. We wanted to keep some element of danger so we put a lot of pitfalls and quick decision making in the forms of rotatable timed cart intersections. The Rashau Mines was also planned to be a dungeon used for the stealth element (mentioned below).
* In the end of Chapter 5, there's a decision on the airship and a disagreement on which way to siege the imperial capitol. By air, or by stealth. This actually made it EXTREMELY far into development, to the point where we voiced the lines, but we ended up scrapping the stealth path, to make it a level/EXP check, since a lot of the end of Chapter 5 involve points of no return, and we wanted to ensure the player was ready equipment and level wise to take on the challenge.
* The game was designed to be completable at level 65, but because we developed so many things out of order, we had no idea how the game would actually play start to finish until the final year of development. By this point, we had so many ways to gain EXP from the story boss battles and passive EXP gains for reserve party members not in the party, that an average player would end up being a bit closer to level 80-85-90 by the time they complete the story, possibly making it a bit too easy. Oops!
* We had plans for the Shiercliff continent to be a lot bigger, with more optional dungeons and high level challenges, including a randomized dungeon. We ended up cutting it down to the essentials in the final year of development.
* A lot of the dungeons in Chapter 6 were remnants of the old 9 and 12 chapter plans for the story we outlined early in development. As we developed the game out of order and a lot of the early game was done with not a lot of planning, we kept these dungeons, scrapped the original story plans we had for them, and gave them a reason to go there during the events of the final chapter.
* There were a lot of scenes that involved Luis doing more crazy things in the story, we ended up cutting that for the sake of keeping the rating Teen friendly and keep him more comic-relief rather than him being borderline creepy.
* Selatria's story progression is handled with hundreds of boolean switches all relying on each other. Looking back, I would have changed this to be an integer variable. This made splitting the game into a dedicated second half almost impossible. That's how we ended up with a "Part 1" and "Full Game" as opposed to releasing Part 2 as DLC.
* Speaking of which, there was a point where I wanted to have a DLC chapter where the game was told through Luis's perspective. That would have been a fun idea, but I'm glad we didn't go through with this.
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Accepting Personal Responsibility
"It's meeeee! I am the problem!"
Don't blame others for your own failures to deliver. Selatria was my baby and I'm the one who allowed it to get to the long development it ended up being. I could have stopped, cancelled the game, or scoped down, but I'm too stubborn of a person to cancel a game so quickly. It would have to be an overwhelming tide I can't get through to not see a game to the end.
I learned more through development of this project than any degree or certification.
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What's Next?
Since Selatria released in August of 2024, I've taken a step back from being in the weeds and have primarily been producing games, making sure we had deliverables and things to show. Selatria left me creatively exhausted, as I really felt like I put everything I had into its battle system, boss, and dungeon design, and I know others did too. I understand how every Final Fantasy game had to be fundamentally different now given the team puts their all into each and every one.
In November of 2025, I gave an abbreviated version of my 13 year development journey with this game and others as a talk to students at UNLV and the IGDA, I've made the presentation publicly available.
And in that talk I mention that there was a period where I just sat down for 6 months to finish Selatria while I was in-between tech jobs. Originally, I was going to take a hiatus and break from game making all together after Selatria wrapped up for about half a year, but hopping right into my current position at Nightdive and Atari forced me to re-think those plans. Producing games for other teams and other companies doesn't drain my game development battery the way actually working on levels and programming does, weird as it sounds. So I think I've recovered from said creative exhaustion.
I'll continue producing awesome games for Nightdive and Atari for as long as they'd like to have me and I want to use 2026 to work on more original indie games I want to have a direct hand in creating. Most of my producing style that I use for all of my teams come from the lessons learned from Selatria, and I wouldn't have been able to head development of those games if it weren't for Selatria.
For Whim Indie, I've already helped design a few levels for our upcoming game "Delivery Issues", directed by my indie game business partner and close friend Matt Estrada. And I've already started the groundwork for a new game I want to direct to take center stage for sometime after Delivery Issues wraps. I am forcing myself to work under some strict limitations on this next project to force myself from it ballooning out of control like Selatria did. If the project does get to the point where I think it's ready to see the light of day, then I will show it!
Do I consider Selatria a failure? If I were to purely look at Steamworks results, dollars and cents, wishlists, and direct sales, I'd say yes. If I were to look at all the people I've met and work with to this day, the lessons that got me to ship all the games I've made since then, the experiences at trade shows, industry events, networking, skills learned, and the safety net it ended up being for experiences for another job when the tech industry doubled down on a technology I fundamentally disagree with at an ethical level and went completely haywire? I would say absolutely not.
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