Yssaia

What is Yssaia?

Since 2018, I've been working a little project that came to be called Yssaia. What began as a simple pitch for an HBO--style show about the return of King Arthur that maybe I'd write in my spare time evolved into a sprawling multimedia worldbuilding project with over 300,000 words of game script, 100+ visual novel sprites, ~20 musical compositions, 10+ co-contributors, and 500+ other assets. The project includes three games, 11 fully developed constructed languages, and a vibrant YouTube community of over 2,000 subscribers.

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At the heart of Yssaia has been my vision for a fantasy, political--drama RPGMaker adventure--game:

"[Untitled Yssaia Game] is a narrative--focused, hand-drawn adventure. Navigate an assassin through her delicate, brutal world after the War annexed her homeland. Delve deep into political dealings, your past trauma, and the Abyss beneath the world."

This project is ongoing and set to release in the next 3-5 years.

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ORIGINS

Since middle school, my friends and I have always sent letters to each other about what's been going on in each other's fantasy worlds. This is how I really fell in love with worldbuilding and fantasy as a genre in the first place -- and each of my worlds ended up corresponding to a particular era in my life. As I was nearing the end for one of mine, I saw the Overly Sarcastic Productions YouTube video about the King Under The Mountain trope -- in which they noted the end of the world in Europe would be wild, with all its different Kings returning, from King Arthur to Vainamoinen to Fionn Mac Cumhaill to the Golem to Charlemagne... I initially imagined this story as an HBO style show about "What if someone nuked all of North America out of existence and this was enough to re-awaken all these old kings and heroes?" Each episode would focus on different hero -- and I imagined the writers for each episode being from the respective nation -- so the audience could get this beautiful pan-European view of what heroism means in a modern age.

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The problem with this pitch? I am not "writers from across Europe."

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But as my friend and resident Ecologist, Jay, put it, "What We Do In the Shadows [the Vampire Mocukmentary] has made and remade like four times -- each time, we make the same jokes, we just do it better. You can always just do the same thing again later."

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And with this, I was off to the races.

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THE FIRST ITERATION

The earliest form of Yssaia was a series of these World Letters, as we called them. This email--based form of serial fiction started as epistolary fiction when we were still in middle school, but my friends and I eventually evolved this tiny subcultural writing style into writing full--on book chapters to each other -- though we had a limit of 4--paragraphs for said letters (after one time I sent something that was twelve Microsoft word pages with 0 paragraph breaks) -- and Yssaia was written in this format.

(This probably doesn't sound very posh to you, but as someone who adores how language and culture shape each other, I think this microcosm of teenage girls growing up in their emails in the 2010s is fascinating. Someday, maybe I'll write something more in--depth about how the form and function of world letters evolved over time, as a case study.)

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However, after years writing like this, I got to a point in my studies where it was time to put together a portfolio. And let me tell you "I've spent 10 years writing fantasy emails to my friends" does not sound very convincingly like a standout portfolio piece. I started calling it a "Webnovel" and posted the chapters online. But (and I'll dip my toe into the "language and culture" analysis here) the problem with serialized webfiction is it has this certain thumbprint you can't get really capture once you bind it in one place -- the repetitive elements that naturally arise when you're publishing something over a long period of time, the time and performance art aspects, non-standard grammar conventions adopted on account of poor web-formatting (remember that email in 2010 had much different capabilities than today). Even the best written fanfiction tend to have these qualities. In other words: it looked amateur, despite it being the writing I took the most seriously. Even if informed, I don't think a person reviewing my portfolio could have looked past those thumbprints -- and, of course, this is assuming they even read it all.

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With these flaws most keenly in mind, I tried to pivot to a medium that would favor them the most: I would repost the emails as blog entries and full commit to the webfiction elements. Then, I would generate a following on social-media to read it and that's how I'd get future employers to recognize it as legitimate. And so, this brings us to our YouTube Era... almost.

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INTERLUDE: YSSAIA GAMES

Prior to entirely pivoting to the webfiction-ification of Yssaia, I'd worked on of handful of tiny games set in the Yssaia universe (called back then the extremely generic title "World of Fates"):

• Little Burned Maiden (August 27th, 2020), the assassin life--sim about murder and self-care, which was a prequel story to Yssaia's webfiction. You can actually still get it on itch.io! This scrappy pixel--art Beat--em--up grossed over $400, with 3,400 reported downloads. Are these rookie numbers? Absolutely, but it's not--nothing for a game by a full--time student in 8--months. I did everything -- sound, design, programming, art, marketing, writing, etc. The only thing I didn't do was music -- I worked with a musician for that.

• Little World of Fates (December 15th, 2021), the class-less, faction-building TTRPG about Politics, Betrayal, and Friendship, came out to much less fanfare -- grossing about $200 despite having 5000 downloads (I suspect a majority of those come from being included in charity bundles).

• Gemshim Fates (December 23rd, 2021), this is a hand--drawn hack--n--slash "gacha game" styled after Genshin Impact featuring my friends' characters. This was more Christmas gift than serious game release, but it has inexplicably grossed ~$15 across its 6 downloads (Thanks, guys <3)

• Little Apocalypse Library (Unreleased), this was going to be a hand--drawn, co--op knowledge--based exploration game. "Find bugs and read books in this coziest end of the world exploratiion game!" This never released on account of me getting a job and being too burned out to touch Unity.

The failure of Little Apocalypse Library was another catalyst for turning to webfiction and social media. I realized "I am making all these little games I don't care about as much when I haven't even finished the main story -- let alone made it available. If I'm going to gamble on a big project, I should gamble on something I actually care about." And so, with this background information explained, we can properly discuss the YouTube Era.

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THE YOUTUBE ERA

On June 14th, 2022, I posted my first Yssaia--focused YouTube video. While I had dabbled on YouTube during the release of Little Burned Maiden, I'd long realized how many skills I lacked to do YouTube properly. I considered YouTube to be the primary medium -- the place for where I needed to maximize all my art, how I was going to present all my worldbuilding, and how I was going to draw people in. So, I studied hard, I posted once a month, and funneled all my other accounts to YouTube and then YouTube to my website. In December of 2023, I reached my first 1000 subscribers and six months later, I was monetized.

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For a long time, I did all my editing in Adobe Photoshop -- which made my videos as janky as you can imagine -- but it did teach me one key skill: The cut. I learned how and when to cut footage to maximize engagement. I got good enough at it that I did trade work for the Vtuber Lexi Koumori and edited all her long form streams into highlights reels that transformed these long--form videos into funny, watchable videos. Eventually, however, Capcut got its desktop version and I transitioned to Capcut. Maybe someday I'll be rich enough to learn Adobe Premiere Pro...

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Some successes from this era include:

• How to Make a Fantasy Language WITHOUT Linguistics: This was one of the easiest videos to make, given it's just a slide show with text, character expressions for my little PNG avatar, and I had written the script as a blog post back in college. As of 2025, this video has 37k views and continues to be the main source of my revenue. (I could probably make more money off of it, if I did mid-roll ads, but I value the clean user experience over the money.)

• Meet Arlasaire, the FIRST Worldbuilding Vtuber: After months of editing in my PNGs, I was already getting sick of it. It's what took the largest bulk of my editing time. So, I forked over the small-car's worth of money to have my Yssaia protagonist made into a Vtuber, to reduce my editing time. Her debut video rocketed up to 1k views and then stayed there -- but many people who declared themselves "not usually interested in Vtubers" said they found her compelling. I studied Vtuber reviews very closely and memorized the format so I could put together something that would meet Vtuber audience expectations while catering to the broader worldbuilding--video audience on the platform.

• Collaborations: After being invited to Cursed Conlang Circus--owner, Agma Schwa, I collaborated with Lichen the Fictioneer, Spacedirt, and Biblarion -- other major faces in the Worldbuilding YouTuber space.

• Somenium Girls, the Conlang Opera: I started doing a yearly celebration in December -- centered around the protagonist's birthday (as well as the increased ad sense available in the month) and in 2023, inspired by the musical numbers that represent operas in games like Genshin Impact or Final Fantasy VI, I decided to release my own fantasy opera. It was composed in the in--universe style of music, written to resonate with target audiences in the in--universe culture, debuted like an idol group in East Asian, and the Opera's lead actress was sung by an own--voices singer. Despite its numbers doing extremely poorly, this project remains one of my favorites on the channel.

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But despite the growing numbers, at the end of the day, the low conversion rate spoke for itself: The audience of people who wanted to know more about worldbuilding in Yssaia were not an audience of people who wanted to read webfiction.

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It was time for another pivot. It was time to make Yssaia marketable.

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THE RPGMAKER ERA

In August of 2023, I made the decision to finish all my current big YouTube projects and then focus entirely on the development of Yssaia as a game. I had friend who had started making a VN at the time and I realized the way I was writing Yssaia was extremely well suited to a Visual Novel. But most of the Visual Novels I have played through to the end would be better classified as "Japanese Adventure Games" (Danganronpa, Ace Attorney, VA-11 HALL-A Cyberpunk Bartending Sim, & Coffee Talk) so I started doing some market research. After all, if the goal was to pivot into something marketable, we had to maximize our market appeal with the pivot.

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Disclaimer that I am not a business person -- but I can type numbers into a spreadsheet and compare them. In order to figure out a basic picture of what I was getting into, I used some wide guestimates to make non-essential business decisions with myself.

So, a visual novel, right? Specifically, a kinetic visual novel where you don't make choices and you just read basically. I did some research into how well other kinetic novels have sold. I used THIS website to determine how much money each of these games made:

• Juniper's Knot: ~$4k USD

• Higurashi (The Whole Series): ~$300k USD (Averaging like 400 reviews per game and $50 for the whole bundle)

• House in Fata Morgana: ~$1 million USD

I picked these out mostly because these are the small handful of kinetic novels I have actually heard about. I'm not saying there aren't other, more successful ones I haven't heard about but I figure, if I'm supposed to be representative of my target audience, I'm as good of a sample as any for this wild estimation.

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Besides, Higurashi has a whole anime -- it is definitely fair to use that as an upper end -- and Juniper's Knot -- a tiny game no one has heard of -- as the lower end. (I mean, $0 is the lower end, but... you know...)

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And that painted a pretty stark picture, honestly. Like, that be looking at 6 to 8 years of work for... maybe a couple thousand for me? Realistically? Maybe up to $300k if I'm super lucky and go viral? And I'm not saying that isn't LIFE CHANGING money but like in the MOST MIRACULOUS scenario here, I would be compensated less than my salary -- which does not sound very marketable to me. Now to make things worse, I'm not a horror-writer and I'm not a romance writer -- and so I will simply not have THAT feral of a fanbase. And on top of all of that, I don't even play that many kinetic visual novels. I realized I was barely in MY OWN target demographic and I didn't think that was worth it.

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"What games DO you actually play Belle?" I play free Chinese Gacha games and I play tiny, cute indie games about walking around -- most notably, RPGMaker adventure games, like Rakuen, Wadanohara and the Great Blue Sea, and To the Moon.

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So, I ran some numbers on on RPGmaker games where you just do narrative and there is very minimal, exploration--focused gameplay:

• Rakuen: 4000+ Reviews, over $100k in profits estimated

• To the Moon: $8 Million in profit

• A Bird Story: Definitely sold worse than To the Moon, was cheaper to make and cheaper to buy -- estimated at $397k

• Wadanohara and the Great Blue Sea: Now this game is free BUT its manga adaptation has 267 reviews on Amazon -- so the creator COULD have made bank on the actual game, presumably.

See how much higher those are? Even when they're not as well known? And sure, the bottom is still $0 ultimately but the upper limit, with the most successful of these titles (and incidentally, the video game that convinced me to get into Game Design, To the Moon) is much much higher.

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And so, with these market values in mind, I bought myself a copy of RPGmaker MZ and started developing for that. Instead of 16x9 for YouTube videos, all my art became focused around game assets. My YouTube production quality took a backseat to writing and editing.

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CURRENT PROGRESS

As of January 2025, after releasing a mockumentary describing all the creatures in Yssaia, we have pivoting to focusing on writing the last stretch of the story. I estimate there to be about 50k more words to go. When I don't have the energy for writing, then I spend time studying visual novel art and working on the potentially endless character sprites for all the different story moments as well as learning tricks and tips about the RPGmaker engine. The puzzles for the exploration--aspects are designed, but not tested nor implemented. And I have a small master doc for every tech feature I will need to implement (primarily with regards to accessibility and secondarily with immersion).

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I still have a long journey ahead of me. But I've made it 7 years -- what's another two or three for the fantasy world I love?