Selatria - A retrospective/post-mortem - This is a brand new blog series I've started over holiday break, and will continue into 2025, at least as long as I have topics to talk about.
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.
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A Retrospective(?)
I'm hesitant to call this series a "Retrospective", or at least the traditional definition of it. When I was talking through my outline for this series to others, I was bringing up points of things I wish I had done or design decisions I wish I had made, and was countered with "it wasn't in the game, so you shouldn't talk about it", which doesn't fit the traditional meaning of a retrospective, so please keep that in mind when I go into topics about my feelings and views on things, I will eventually tie it into how it affected Selatria's development, in one way or another.
Some of the thoughts into these posts may be a bit unorganized, or I may bring up the same problem in different topics if it applies to both. This is more or less a longer-form draft of future talks/panels I plan to give at future conventions. For those who may be veterans in software or the game industry may look at some of these posts and topics and note how foolish I was, and at the same time some students or newer graduates wanting to make their own games or start a small indie game may find some of these tips incredibly helpful.
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How did Selatria Start/Came to Be?
I have been making RPG Maker games for about 20 years. When I was in 8th grade, I saw a used copy of RPG Maker for the PS1 at an Electronics Boutique in Ontario Mills and was immediately hooked. It didn't have a way to program things in the general sense, you had to use a PS1 controller to go down a bunch of pre-scripted event commands and map things tile by tile with a D-Pad. You could save your creations on a memory card, but because the size of the memory cards were so small, you had to swap in multiple memory cards to be able to load entire games. I ended up getting one of those after-market memory cards, where you could push a button on the top to "swap" the memory card rather than changing out multiple memory cards.
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| RPG Maker for PS1 (Not my copy) |
I eventually got tired of using a controller to put in every single character of dialogue on the PS1/PS2 and found a download of RPG Maker XP for PC and started making small (note: really bad) games in high school. This was also the first time I was introduced to coding/programming, with the RGSS1 that was available. I would take a bunch of scripts from the internet and forums and plugged them in, not knowing exactly what anything did and not understanding how opposing systems would break one another. I took a Visual Basic course in my senior year of high school to try and learn programming, but Computer Science courses were in its infancy at the school district I was in and the teacher was a retired math teacher who was on his way to full retirement, which made it pretty much a self-study course, and didn't do much for me. I decided to drop the class after one semester and try it again in college.
Fast forward a few years to early 2010. I was mid-way through college at this point, and with some knowledge of the C++/Java programming courses, I've started to tinker with some basic Ruby code. After struggling with a Java assignment, I met the professor for office hours, and saw a pamphlet for the IGDA on his desk. The International Game Developers' Association. I decided to sneak down into these meetings in Orange County about 60-75 miles away without being a member, and clearly having no business being there (or so I thought, in retrospect this was silly - I'm sure they wanted to mentor students like me). Developers would host these monthly meetings at Obsidian Entertainment, on the Blizzard campus, and I was inspired, just for a glimpse to see people doing this as actual jobs, even though I sat in the back and was too scared to actually talk to or network with anybody.
Around the same time, a friend of a friend wanted to make a small collective. Somewhere for creatives to have some kind of outlet. It took the form of making YouTube skits, making music or any art, and I wanted to bring up the idea of having my games being a part of this group. It was there I met Jon, who played my RPG Maker XP and immediately gave a lot of feedback on how this game could be improved. I ended up releasing this game over MegaUpload (RIP) in late 2010, and I wanted to start something new. Unfortunately this collective fell apart soon after this, and after getting inspired by showing another one of the people in this group the newest RPG Maker at the time, wanted to start a new project. After talking it over with Mizore, he suggested having a game with voice acting, as he was interested in it, and it would be an interesting challenge for an RPG Maker game. Mizore and Milo were asked to voice the two main characters, I contacted Jon to help me with balance and game design, an artist friend (the first of many changes to come...), and a friend from my FFXI/FFXIV linkshell to help write the story about two countries at war, and the basis for Codename: EPIC, or what would be Selatria, started on January 3, 2011 and would involve a lot more friends, associates, and professionals added to the project over the next 13 years.
Selatria Part 1 - About Profit-Sharing vs Commissions, Game Production, and Scope Creep will be posted on Monday, December 30.
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