Why I Decided to Pivot Our Cricket Management Game
A founder note on burnout, the Steam demo, and why SELECT ELEVEN is moving from a nations-first structure toward a league-driven cricket management game.
I started SELECT ELEVEN because I was frustrated by the cricket management games I could not find.
The first version was not meant to be a commercial project. It was a small prototype for myself: something I could play, test, break, and enjoy. Then I kept adding features. Selection logic. Match systems. Squad decisions. More of the game started to appear, and for the first time it felt like the idea might be worth pursuing properly.
So I threw the prototype away and began again.
For a few months I worked on it every day. Ten or twelve hours was normal. I was building all day and thinking about the game at night. At that stage, making the game was becoming more enjoyable than playing games.
My first plan was simple: work hard for three months, ship a decent cricket management game, and let people play it.
By the end of those three months, I knew that plan was an illusion.
The first scope cut
There were too many features to build, and building them in a way that felt tasteful was going to take much longer than I expected. As a solo developer, the risk was not just that the game would be late. The real risk was that I would burn out before I shipped anything.
That forced the first major scope decision. I decided to build the game around national teams.
That choice reduced a lot of complexity. It meant fewer systems around clubs, contracts, transfers, and long-term league structure. It gave me a clearer route to a playable demo, and for the next six months I followed that route.
I kept building. I redesigned and reskinned the game more than once because the old UI started to feel wrong. I added features, changed screens, connected systems, and kept pushing toward something I could finally show.
Then I hit the wall.
When I shared the first version with a few friends, they did not see the months of work behind it. They saw bugs.
They were right. I had been so focused on building forward that I had stopped seeing the problems clearly. I paused feature work and started testing the game more thoroughly. The more I tested, the more bugs I found, and the further away shipping started to feel.
That was the hardest point in development so far. I had built a lot, but the game suddenly felt less finished than it had ever felt.
I planned to take two weeks away from it. Two weeks became four. Four became eight. At that point SELECT ELEVEN was close to joining the unfinished-project graveyard.
The thing that helped was that I had been talking about the game openly with friends and family. They knew how much work had gone into it, and they gave me the wake-up call I needed. I sat down again, opened the project, and started looking at the bugs without the burnout.
It turned out there were not as many as I had convinced myself there were.
I fixed the first set of issues, wrapped up the demo features, and moved into the Steam registration and review process. That demo is now ready. SELECT ELEVEN will go live on Steam on June 21, 2026.
The demo is intentionally limited. It is there to show the feel of the game: the selection pressure, the tactical choices, the match flow, and the kind of cricket management game I wanted badly enough to start building it myself.
Why pivot now?
The obvious next step would be to continue from the demo structure and finish the national-team version of the game.
But preparing the demo changed the way I looked at the full game.
During the Steam process, and through Reddit posts and conversations with players, I started hearing a consistent point from hardcore management sim fans and cricket gamers. Cricket management games have often struggled because they do not create enough long-term strategic pressure. They can simulate matches, but they do not always create the season-by-season consequences that make you want to play one more year.
That forced me to look at cricket differently as a game structure.
In football, leagues and cups are the center of the sport. Nations matter, but club football carries most of the week-to-week story. Tables, promotions, relegations, transfers, continental qualification, title races, cup runs, and financial pressure all pull against each other.
Cricket is different. International cricket has the clearest identity and the biggest history. Franchise leagues exist, and some are huge, but the global league structure is not as consistent or universally meaningful as football’s. If you remove the IPL from the conversation, it is difficult to point to one cricket league system that carries the same natural story weight across the sport.
That creates a design problem.
A good management game needs consequences beyond the match result.
Every match should matter, but not in the same way. One match should change a title race. Another should drag you toward relegation. Another should force a selection risk because a cup semi-final is three days away. Another should make you choose between developing a young player and protecting your place in the table.
That is the pressure I want SELECT ELEVEN to create.
The new direction
I have decided to pivot the full game toward a proper league-driven structure.
That means the league system will take center stage. I am introducing transfers, league position consequences, promotion, relegation, regional cups, and championships. The goal is to create tension in more than one direction at the same time, so squad decisions are not isolated choices. They become part of a season.
This is unconventional for cricket, but I think it is the right move for the game.
SELECT ELEVEN does not need to copy cricket one-to-one. It needs to be a strong cricket management simulation. Realism matters, but realism is not just a list of real-world formats. It is the feeling that decisions have weight, that the season remembers what you did, and that your squad becomes a long-term project rather than a collection of names picked for one match.
The national-team work is not wasted. The demo still shows important parts of the game: match rhythm, selection, tactics, and the pressure of watching a plan play out ball by ball. But for the full release, I believe the game needs a larger competitive structure around those systems.
That is the pivot.
More consequence. More season pressure. More reasons to care about the next match before it starts.
I am putting a lot of faith in this direction, and it means making a hard change late in development. But I would rather make the hard change now than ship a game that is easier to finish but weaker as a management sim.
The demo goes live on Steam on June 21. Play it, test it, break it, and tell me what feels right and what does not. The feedback from that demo will help shape the full league-driven version of SELECT ELEVEN.