This development log entry will primarily be devoted to the up-to-date progress of Selatria going into the new year.
I'd like to start off the post with a very important announcement. As of 7:32 PM on 12/28/2018, all of the main scenario dialogue has been implemented into Selatria! It's been a long time and with a lot of help from the studio team. The dialogue for all of Selatria is several hundred pages and that's just for the main scenario alone. It took almost eight years of tweaking and editing to get all of the dialogue into the project, and now we can focus on other aspects of the game and not be tied down by having to implement pages upon pages of main scenario content. That being said...
The focus for the rest of the development cycle is as follows.
• We are prioritizing making parts of dungeons that contain story cut-scenes before completing the rest of the dungeons. Cut-scenes are the most time consuming aspect of Selatria to create and we are creating the areas with cutscenes before finishing other incomplete sections of dungeons.
• We are planning to implement unique victory poses for each character. The art has been completed, but implementation of this will happen in January.
• Expanding the testing team to test Selatria and give feedback on implemented content to minimize the amount of bugs and errors leading into release. Over the course of 2017-2018, we've had two testers, but we're looking to increase it to a team of 4-5 people.
• Research Steam achievement API and see if implementation will be feasible (Q1 2019)
• Finishing and adjusting dungeon content (Ongoing)
• Finishing and adjusting battle content (Ongoing)
• Finishing and adjusting story and cut-scene content with related voiceovers (Ongoing)
• Finishing and adjusting art content (Ongoing)
Here are two shots from one of the dungeons in the later chapters of Selatria. This is from an upcoming dungeon called the Mirage Temple. The team will need to return to a newly discovered section of the Mirage Forest to track down an artifact for the story.
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For this next part, I'm taking a different PR approach and outline what will NOT make it to the initial launch and what may be designated for post-release content. This is going to be a spoiler-free version of the development timeline for the rest of the game and may still be subject to change leading up to the final launch of the game.
Cuts to the original plan and scope of the game are going to be necessary in order to reasonably finish the game on time. We know there were grand plans for some of the dungeons and obstacles but we are going to be putting focus on what gets the game done while still being fun and enjoyable. So I'd like to dive in on some of the necessary changes coming to the Selatria project in 2019.
What is going to be cut from the vanilla game to make the 2019 deadline for completing the game. This is not a final list, but I’ve been doing a line by line breakdown of what we want to do to get this game done.
• Final chapter dungeons are going to be cut down in scale and reworked with an emphasis on fun over complexity. One major recurring mechanic rather than multiple mechanics.
• We are planning on cutting down the planned level for which the game is to be completed. This will help us balance the characters and make every few levels gained to be meaningful.
• Redundant/underused abilities are going to be removed from the game for all characters. Taking feedback from Selatria: Advent of the Dakk'rian Empire release, we as designers don’t utilize all the different status effects enough and it’s difficult to make one spell for each specific instance. Paralypur, Poispur, Sealpur, etc, is going to be consolidated to one single target spell called “Purify” and the area spell “Purify 2” will be changed to “Cleanse”. We also want to avoid long ability lists as players will be inclined to not use weaker abilities at later levels. For those who plan on carrying their save data over from Selatria: Advent of the Dakk'rian Empire, these changes will be automatically applied when the save data is loaded into the full game.
• We plan on having post-release content that expand on character backstories. These updates will be FREE and will not be marketed as purchasable downloadable content. I cannot promise the backstory content will have voiceovers. That will depend on how Selatria performs sales-wise.
• There will be one optional super difficult dungeon at launch and one optional super difficult dungeon in one of the free updates post-launch. More details on these dungeons will come in development updates in 2019.
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There's a lot of exciting announcements coming for our studio in 2019. As of January 3, it will have been 8 years of development on Selatria, and 2019 will be our final year of working on the full-initial launch, with more post-release content to come after. I'm glad we're on the last stretch to the development of this project and I can't wait to show you what else we have planned come next year. Happy New Year and I'll follow-up more in 2019!
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