April 2020 Update

Dear Backers,

Before I jump in, I want to start this month's update by acknowledging that it feels like the world has turned upside down since our last update. Never in a million years would I have guessed things could escalate so fast.

I admit, I sat here staring at an empty New update on Kickstarter for a couple days, trying to figure out how to talk about the game's progress. It feels somewhat disrespectful to talk about our trivial challenges and successes, when something like this is happening around us. I sincerely hope that wherever you are in the world, you are staying safe and healthy. I hope that you are communicating with loved ones and friends, and most of all I hope you are working with each other to help make sure everyone makes it through this difficult time.

A little over two weeks ago, Little Orbit asked all employees to take their hardware home so they could work remotely. We now conduct all of our communication on Slack including daily check-ins and several weekly team meetings. And I must say, I am very impressed with how quickly they got back up and running. Despite all the setbacks, we made very good progress this month across a wide range of areas.

General Update on Progress

We are now fully implemented on Missions 1-3. Everything from cutscenes, gameplay, dialog, and all the classes/abilities you get at that point. We have also completed work on the Hub environment, and implemented parts of the Job Menu screen. Progression and leveling are also in, and we have a basic Battle Results screen at the end of every mission that awards XP and items. At this point, we're only missing the final intro, world map, and mission selection to round out the Start of Game experience.

Cutscene System

A lot of back-end work and collaboration with the Programming team went in this month to give Design the ability to create cutscenes that work within the already established gameplay of Unsung Story. With the current amount of cutscenes we are planning on having we needed the ability to script them together, as opposed to hand animating them or tediously calling specific basic animations (like a walk cycle) every time we needed a character to move. The team now has a customized, expandable system that will meet our needs for the rest of development.

As I said earlier, the beginning, in-game, and end cutscenes for missions 1-3 have been implemented, as a trial run for this new system and it's been wildly success so far. These cinematics have started putting together our world of Unsung Story, and it's breathed character and life into what was previously just a series of gameplay missions.

Here is a teaser shot from a recent cutscene.

Story and Timeline Consolidation and Revision

The story meetings you heard about back in February have given the team our final version of the narrative and its main story beats, as well as how we want to get there. The narrative is the tightest and most cohesive it's been so far, and this has allowed us to really dig deep and solidify the lore and world. We sat down in March and fleshed out characters, revised the world's timeline in small ways, and identified gaps in the lore that we discovered during our story meetings. This helped us write the first pass dialogue for the first chapter, which we have implemented in missions 1 through 3.

UI/UX wireframes

While Art refines and makes the UI look better than ever, Design has also been hard at work trying to stay one step ahead to wireframe screens for core game systems. We have completed a first pass on the Job Menu and Battle Results screen, which has been sent over to Art and implemented. Work is now shifting to the Unit Recruitment menu.

This is the work-in-progress implementation of the Job Menu. It's too text heavy and the fonts are being changed, but you can access this screen in the Character Hub in the current build.

Tuning of player skills and job progression

Now that the core game loop, cinematics, and main flow of the game is coming together, Design revisited the starting Jobs and their skills. All Jobs available for chapter 1 have been given another tuning, with skill progression within these jobs coming online. Before, we had a collection of skills from varying levels available to play strictly for dev testing purposes. Now QA and other players have to begin the game with the real starting units.

Itemization

Itemization has started to enter the design phase, with tiers, types, and stats of items being fleshed out and designed on paper. We now have an accurate estimate on the number of weapons and items in the game, including all variants. Art has begun work on some of the weapon models and needed UI to support the item and weapon systems going in.

System design

I'm not going to go into any detail here, but throughout all the work that's been done in March, we are still designing out and having discussions on gameplay systems that will be coming online in the next few months. Some of these you have seen in updates, the ones you haven't are still in the early stages of designing and will be shared in the future once they are fully fleshed out and implemented.

Fun Bits to Show off

Here is a collection of things that we worked on in March.

I'll start with some of the in-game dialog UIs. Back in February I talked about the "Comment" and "Conversation" interfaces. I already posted an example of a Comment, so here are some examples of Conversations. These typically appear during cutscenes.

NOTE: Portraits and fonts are still placeholder.

I also want to show off the Character Hub environment. I wont go into the back story of where this is specifically, but I think Art did an amazing job. Due to animation running behind, we're using the Automatank to run around and show the movement in this area. This is where players can access the Job Menu.

Rather than force the player to use the same grid system from the missions, we allow them to free roam and interact with the various NPCs here.

And finally I'd like to finish up this month's update with examples of two visual effect pieces that Art worked on. These are both Automatank abilities: Kinetic Slam and Steam Venting Protocol.

I'll be back next month for another update.

Sincerely,
Matthew Scott