AVARIAvs
A fan and critic favorite, but ultimately a commercial failure.
The brief
A design-led founder arc. AVARIAvs fused turn-based JRPG depth with real-time PVP tension: a genre hybrid nobody had positioned before.
The design cleared every gate. It funded on Kickstarter, and Kickstarter invited it to their official PAX East Couchland showcase. It won GDC Play Best in Play 2018, placed in Global Top Round's Top 20, earned official selections at PAX East and PAX West, and joined the Indie MEGABOOTH at PAX East 2019. Publisher scouts worldwide took notice.
It never got a wide release. The team had raised roughly $500,000 privately, but completing the vision and funding live ops needed a publisher, especially for community management around the streamer and influencer tournaments they wanted to run. Two deals with reputable publishers came close. One fell through because the publisher required a unanimous stakeholder vote and a single holdout on the marketing team blocked it. The other fell through because that publisher had just signed another JRPG and did not want to cannibalize its curated roster.
Role & scope
Andrew directed a 40-person team at peak, as Executive Producer, Product Designer, and Co-Game Designer. Studio-scale production funded by roughly $500,000 in privately raised capital.
The systems showcase is the hybrid combat design: radial-menu combat, a Focus system with levels 1 through 5, and PVP input timers with speed-tie resolution.
Process · the decisions
01 · Designing the hybrid combat system
The combat blended its influences on purpose. Old turn-based Final Fantasy menus set the structure. MOBA leveling shaped progression. Quick button-input sequences, closer to Mortal Kombat finishing moves, added execution. The original Helldivers, contemporary at the time, informed how the systems felt to play.
On top of that sat the pieces that made it a true hybrid: a radial-menu combat interface, a Focus system running levels 1 through 5, and PVP input timers with speed-tie resolution, so a real-time duel could still resolve fairly.
02 · What the festival circuit proved
The festival circuit was the proving ground, and the game did well from the start. Its first showing, at MAGFest, won Best Booth in the indie section. The team ran a booth tournament with email-signup conversion close to 100 percent.
The pattern held everywhere after that. People who got the game fell for it completely, and people who were not JRPG fans were still curious to play with friends, especially through the 1v1 PVP mode, a natural fit for festival crowds. From there it won GDC Play Best in Play 2018, placed in Global Top Round's Top 20, earned official selections at PAX East and PAX West, and joined the Indie MEGABOOTH at PAX East 2019.
03 · The post-mortem
This was Andrew's first game, and he has no regrets. The team put their heart into it and built something genuinely good. The design cleared every gate a game is supposed to clear.
The one lesson he carried into everything since: just because something doesn't exist doesn't mean the market wants it. Sometimes things don't exist for a reason. AVARIAvs never got a wide release, so he can't say for certain that is what happened here, but that is his honest read looking back.
Outcome
The product won the hearts of players and publisher scouts around the world. The same genre fusion that won design awards, JRPG depth fused with real-time PVP, was the hard thing for marketing teams to place, and the two deals that would have funded the full vision both fell through for reasons outside the product's quality.
A commercially failed but design-celebrated project, told straight. Separating craft outcomes from market outcomes is the point.
Fun fact: the game is still alive and the servers are still running. Want to play? Get in touch and Andrew will happily send over a handful of keys.
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