02/12/2020
Saviorless, a development tale.
This long journey begins when got funded with the Indiegogo campaign in 2016. By that time the future looked promising for us, we arrived with $13,000 back to Cuba, which we thought was an inexhaustible amount of money and full of confidence that the game would be completed in two years. With the support of an American foundation, the great reception of the video game specialized press, and several invitations to events in the video game world in which we got to promote our game were factors that had us believing our dream was easily accessible. Then 2017 would prove to us that none of that was exactly right.
Maybe our first big mistake was that we never saw the demo as what it was: A DEMO. On the contrary, our focus was that it was the beginning of the development of the full game. That route made us make decisions in haste which would eventually bring about a multitude of problems in the production as we progressed. That is how we ended up with several unfinished demos, the last of which was shown at the Video Game Gallery in Chicago in 2017.
After evaluating the public’s reaction we discovered that even though the visuals were impacting favorably on the players, the core mechanic and general gameplay was not received as well, on top of the fact that the game was rather unstable. Just as we were at this point of development the programmer decided to abandon the project for personal reasons and simultaneously the US embassy in Havana was closed and relations between our countries became complicated. To complicate things even more, the American foundation which had been our support, Innovadores Foundation, was asked to leave Cuba by the government. So at this point (mid-2017), the project lacked a programmer, financial backing, and I realized that the resources we had turned out to be insufficient for the scale of the game I had in mind.
This is when David Darias enters as the new programmer of Savior. We thought at the beginning we were going “to fix” the Chicago demo, but we decided that we had to restructure practically the whole project. Of the original idea, only the visuals would be kept because we knew it had acceptance by the public but we had to transition the format from HD to 4K which meant that all the art had to be redone.
From 2018 to 2020, we began to work on the third demo, concentrating on the game mechanics which, due to its very particular nature, generated many complexities which we had to tackle as they surfaced. We decided to work without social networking, isolated; thinking this gave us a better chance to completely concentrate on the product and cut costs since our Indiegogo funds had already been depleted. Note that internet access in Cuba up to 2018 was on public parks and even today the prices for mobile data packages are very high. That strategy of isolation from social media only ended up in bad results. Today I realize that external feedback is an integral part of the development of a good independent video game, direct contact with the users is what gives us the feedback which lets us know if the decisions made at each step work or not. To further explain this point, when the third demo was finished, we realized that even though we had created a good product, even an original one, it was missing one of the most important elements of all: fun.
To make things even worse, Starsoft a US-based studio, deliberately ignoring all the overwhelming online evidence of our existence, copyrighted the name “Savior” for their own game, spoiling in the process all the promotional work and player awareness that we had done so far. We should have registered the name at the beginning, another hard lesson learned, and so we were forced to rename the game as “Saviorless”.
Don’t ask me why, but the fact that we were creating a new and fourth demo under a new name had a revitalizing effect on the team. It was the first time we sat back and decided to go with our strong points which we had gained during the last years and the previous demos. It wasn’t easy, don’t get me wrong, getting to this demo which we sent you this week, took three extensive interactions during a whole year in which we redesigned the mechanics and the gameplay of the game almost totally over again. To our great satisfaction, for the first time we heard among our friend testers, “this game is fun to play”.
As always, we look forward to hearing more feedback about the demo! and remember to:
Wishlist Saviorless on Steam!!! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1438480/
Also:
Join the Saviorless server on Discord:
https://discord.gg/pY858tjRrm
Follow us on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/saviorlessgame
Thank you for all your support, patience and help received, we would not have gotten here without it.
