December Update - Back into development

Dear Backers,

We finally got far enough ahead to transition some members of the Unsung Story team back into development this month. With the late Thanksgiving this year, November ended up being 1 week shorter for the team, but we did get a full week before the break to jump back in.

To kick things off we did a full review of progress from where we left off with a focus on the Chapter 1 MVP.

The initial roadmap for the next couple months includes:

• Finish implementing all the environment art for Levels 1 - 7. This involves swapping out elements of our whitebox levels to transfer gameplay functionality to the finished art versions.
• UI review to identify and prioritize the design and implementation of the remaining screens such as Main Menu, Main Map, Chapter Map, Character Details, Equipment Management, Victory Screen, Vendor Menu, Options Menu, Party Management, Unit Customization, Job Selection/Review, Unit Recruitment
• Design review to identify and prioritize the few remaining systems we need to finish such as Equipment/Itemization, Unit Recruitment including random generation of stats/appearance, Cosmetic/appearance unlocks, Job progression/unlocks, Artifact (lore) items, and Skill mastery details.
• Engineering review to breakdown the existing systems and schedule resources to implement the design deliverables for new systems so designers can load the game data.
• Technical art review to go over skyboxes, weather/time of day, camera occlusion, vfx, animation, unit item socket system for weapons, and post processing.
• Art review to identify missing Player unit models, Story character models, creature models, vendor models, icons, etc.
• Story review for cutscenes and dialog.

NOTE: It looks like we accidentally included the Sharpshooter in our original MVP scope, but that job is a bit too far down the job tree. Some adjustments will be made.

I also want to acknowledge some of backer comments about Industry Crunch. Little Orbit does try to avoid longer working hours where ever possible. Many of my employees have been with us for more than 10 years, and I think of them as extended family. For this month, we were able to scale back to regular hours for the bulk of the team.

Everyone has expressed their excitement to be back and even some frustration with the short amount of time to work on Unsung during November. But on behalf of the entire team, we appreciate your patience and support, and I hope all the backers got a nice holiday break.

I'll be back next month for another update.

Sincerely,
Matthew Scott