Vapourware "Yasumi Matsuno may or may not be surprised his new game is being released" Unsung Story thread

[Viata]

First the bad news.. Little Orbit is starting from scratch. We have spent hours going through the Kickstarter comments and researching all of the project materials, and I feel the backers have made one thing clear – we need to focus on the original single player game and Matsuno’s design that was promoted during the campaign. And that is exactly what we are going to do. At this point, our primary goal is to separate the years of modifications and changes that were made while Playdek attempted to deliver something to their backers.

:australia:

 

[Humanity has risen!]

InXile made many lame licensed games in attempting to build a nest egg to use on proper games in the future, like that talking babies games that was in the news at one point because it was thought that some of the baby babbling said Islam is the light.

 

[Perkel]

First the bad news.. Little Orbit is starting from scratch. We have spent hours going through the Kickstarter comments and researching all of the project materials, and I feel the backers have made one thing clear – we need to focus on the original single player game and Matsuno’s design that was promoted during the campaign. And that is exactly what we are going to do. At this point, our primary goal is to separate the years of modifications and changes that were made while Playdek attempted to deliver something to their backers.

:australia:

IT would be amazing if barbie developer would actually rekease proper tactical Matsuno game.

IT would be the wildest ride ever.

 

[LESS T_T]

I think the closest thing they made was Falling Skies: The Game: The nuXCOM Clone, which was poorly received on all fronts.

 

[LESS T_T]

http://www.usgamer.net/articles/uns...xplains-why-they-took-on-such-a-toxic-project

Unsung Story's New Developer Explains Why They Took on Such a Toxic Project
Little Orbit believes in the project, can Unsung Story be saved?


The long-troubled Kickstarter game, Unsung Story, was supposed to be the next big game from the mind of Yasumi Matsuno (of Final Fantasy Tactics fame). Instead developer Playdek failed to produce a functioning game and decided to abandon ship. Now, Little Orbit is taking over the project. Until recently Little Orbit was best known for producing licensed retail games, but in a statement to USgamer, the company's CEO explains why the studio has decided to salvage Unsung Story, as well as reveal further problems the game suffered under Playdek.

In an email to USgamer, Matt Scott from Little Orbit explained that despite the success the studio had with licensed games, Little Orbit has been trying to transition into indie digital development/publishing. However at the time, the studio didn't have a catalog suitable for the transition. Then came Unsung Story.

"I discovered Unsung during a meeting with Playdek about a completely different topic. The more I looked into it, the more I liked it," said Scott citing the story and RPG designs which were all created by Matsuno. "Like thousands of backers who spent their money on it, I love the game that Unsung Story wants to be. So ultimately we decided to take it over."

Scott tells USgamer that Little Orbit plans on delivering the game, but there are some big questions lingering over the project. Is Matsuno still involved? What about the promised music from Hitoshi Sakimoto? Little Orbit gave us some answers, but they just paint a more troubled picture of the project under Playdek.

Regarding Matsuno's involvement, Scott tells me that he's not working with Little Orbit "at the moment."

"We have all of the materials that Matsuno did for Playdek before they separated ways. We are reaching out to him now to see if he can be involved more going forward, but since we can't guarantee his future involvement, we are taking his original work very seriously." To this end, Little Orbit will be retranslating everything from Japanese to make sure the game design and narrative ideas are as accurate as possible, but that does call into question how much Little Orbit trusts the work done by Playdek in that regard.

As for Sakimoto's music, which some backers suggest Playdek could release given how long ago the promised music must've been completed, Scott tells us that Little Orbit "[was] not given any music."

"I was told that a problem came up with the contract, and no music was ever created. However we are reaching out to Sakimoto to see if we can make that happen."

Scott wants to make it clear that the decision to take on Unsung Story didn't come lightly. "This has been incredibly frustrating for a lot of people, and there is a lot of toxicity in the project," which is accurate and makes me wonder why even take on such a loaded project in the first place.

"I knew going in that this would be a lot of work, but I also felt that it couldn't get any worse than it already was, so why not try."

 

[Rahdulan]

Seems to be quite a disaster in the making.

 

[Delterius]

As for Sakimoto's music, which some backers suggest Playdek could release given how long ago the promised music must've been completed, Scott tells us that Little Orbit "[was] not given any music."

Why are we still here. Just to suffer.

 

[Abu Antar]

Seems to be quite a disaster in the making.

At least Mighty No. 9 released. I haven't touched it and I never will, but they managed to do more than PlayDek ever did.

 

[LESS T_T]

Status report from the new owner Little Orbit: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/482445197/unsung-story-tale-of-the-guardians/posts/1977466

At least they sound very sincere and thoughtful.

See what Playdek has done (or not done) over the years, here's game production related part:

Next, I'd like to discuss a couple internal discussions that we encountered this month.

WAITING V. MOVING FORWARD
In an effort to deliver the game that Playdek promised, we reached out directly to Yasumi Matsuno, Akihiko Yoshida, and Hitoshi Sakimoto. Matsuno's storyline and design are incomplete. As the days roll by with no response, we have begun to ask ourselves how long can we afford to wait while backers see no progress. And from a practical standpoint, we have a game to make. With that in mind, we will begin locking down key aspects of the game in art, design, and story over the month of September.

SPOILERS V. SURPRISE
In preparing this update, we all felt an overwhelming desire to share everything we've been working on while we wait for responses from Matsuno, Yoshida, and Sakimoto. Going forward, we need to balance the number of things we potentially spoil for backers. I don't want to sacrifice the amazing surprises that await players down the road when they finally get to play the game. Instead we will focus on other ways to show real progress.

As a consolation, I will share one new part of the design that is core to the direction of the game at the bottom of this update.

COPYING V. INSPIRATION
Several backers sent us suggestions about reducing the scope of the project and some even went so far as to say we should just copy Final Fantasy Tactics in order to fulfill the campaign promises and release a game they could enjoy. I think this is an important topic, and one that I want to set the record straight on.

As much as we all love Final Fantasy Tactics, we cannot release a “copy” of that game. Instead, we are 100% focused on Matsuno's new design that took inspiration from his earlier work. Unsung Story has many great innovative elements, and while those will take a little longer to build, we are confident that the wait will be worth it.

Here are some of the areas we worked on this month.

MATSUNO’S ORIGINAL DESIGN AND STORY
Our internal team has finished going through all of Matsuno's retranslated original work, and an enhanced high concept for the game has been finalized that embellishes on some great seeds planted within the original design. Additionally, the design team has reconstructed the game flow through each of the chapters and identified the cities, characters, and general themes that we'll be focusing on. I am extremely pleased with what they have come up with so far, and I look forward to seeing the world of Unsung Story evolve far enough that we can begin to share more details. Expect some things to stay exactly like Playdek presented, and some to change.

FFT MODDING COMMUNITY HELP
During August several members of the FFT modding community approached us, expressing their desire to be involved. We have decided to utilize this team to evaluate our general approach to the game design, controls, art, and narrative. To that end, we have put them under NDA, and for about two weeks now, they have been providing feedback.

Yes, they have had lots of exposure to the project. No, we wont reveal their names. Yet. But I may have one or two of them contribute to these updates down the road.

ART TESTS
We ran a couple visual tests to work with the size of elements on the screen and camera angles. We even looked at some 2D pixel art created for Unsung Story by the FFT modding team, which I must say came out spectacular. But for various reasons, I have decided to stick with the full 3D game that the campaign originally promised.

RECONSTRUCTION OF THE GDD
One of the most prevalent questions last month was "When will the game be ready?" In order to answer that question with any accuracy, we need to finalize the game design document. The end goal of any GDD is to map out the systems and scope of the game in great detail so that we can design the schedule and milestones. Playdek's design contained some of Matsuno's ideas, some PvP ideas, and some of their own original ideas. We decided to start from scratch at the end of July. Our goal is to preserve the heart of the game you backed while also assuring that all the pieces will fit together in an amazing game.

**DESIGN SPOILER**
During our review, we came across a section in the World Overview about the magic system and how spells are cast. One of our designers found this section oddly specific. According to this section spells are more than just words, regents, or movement. A caster must "use a special intonation" to harness true magic by moving tone up and down through energy points in the body like octaves on a musical scale.

That means that in the world of Unsung Story, the tone of a spell is crucial, and the most powerful spells are sung.

Before next month, we will be reaching out to the $1K+ backers to start including them in our design process. So you may start to see backer-only updates.

Thank you for your continued patience and support.

Sincerely, Matthew Scott

 

[Hyperion]

FFT MODDING COMMUNITY HELP
During August several members of the FFT modding community approached us, expressing their desire to be involved. We have decided to utilize this team to evaluate our general approach to the game design, controls, art, and narrative. To that end, we have put them under NDA, and for about two weeks now, they have been providing feedback.

Yes, they have had lots of exposure to the project. No, we wont reveal their names. Yet. But I may have one or two of them contribute to these updates down the road.

 

[aweigh]

modders will fix it should be the main story in all rpgs the chosen one must mod

 

[Zombra]

Another "absolutely nothing" update. I skimmed it twice and still can't figure out if it said anything.

Update #59

Oct 1 2017

October brings backer exclusive content

Dear backers,

I can't believe we're two months in!

Hopefully you guys are enjoying the monthly rhythm of these updates. From the start, we realized that if we were going to take Unsung Story over, it would be critical to establish a reliable level of communication.

Here are the general updates for the month of September:

FOUR DIFFERENT UPDATES

This month I thought we would try something a little different. Honestly, this is our first time running a Kickstarter, so I have no idea how well this will work, but in reviewing the Unsung Story campaign it was pointed out to me that you guys have gotten very little in the way of exclusive content. Everything has been publicly posted.

Where is the fun in that? You paid good money to be a part of something special. So here is what we're going to try:

• This is the first update. It walks through general news and our communication channels, which will be more and more important in the coming months.
• The second update will discuss changes to rewards and add-ons, and it will be another public update.
• The third update will be focused on some initial design decisions. This update will initially be posted to Design Consultants and Collector backers and above. Don't worry, we will be sharing these details will everyone a couple days later.
• The last update will be focused on some initial art decisions. This update will be initially posted to Art Consultants and Collector backers and above. Again, we will be sharing these details with everyone else soon.

As we move forward, we hope to start providing exclusive access to Unsung Story updates for allthe backers. For this month, we just wanted to do something fun for the many backers who spent more than $150 each and have never gotten any special perks.

FACEBOOK IS BACK

As some of you may recall, we announced in September that a technical problem was preventing us from getting admin rights to Facebook for the Unsung Story page, but we're finally in! The page has been cleaned up for a fresh start. We were surprised how many backers didn't yet know we had taken over the project.

Going forward we will be updating Facebook with relevant links and new content, so if you haven't already, please take a moment to go Like our page:

https://www.facebook.com/TheUnsungStory/

REMINDER ABOUT TWITTER

We're also on Twitter. This is a great, bite-sized way for us to categorize new information with hashtags and retweet updates from the community. We also have some upcoming plans for using Twitter differently than Facebook, so make sure to follow us there as well.

https://twitter.com/UnsungStory/

NEW LITTLE ORBIT WEBSITE

Lastly, we didn't get a lot of say in the timing of taking over Unsung Story. We were in the middle of overhauling our own site, but once the deal was signed, we were asked to notify you guys immediately.

The new version of the site is finally up, and we've added backer-level specific forums! Feel free to go check it out:

http://littleorbit.com

Thank you for your continued patience and support.

Sincerely, Matthew Scott

 

[Tigranes]

"Hopefully you guys are enjoying the monthly rhythm of these updates. From the start, we realized that if we were going to take Unsung Story over, it would be critical to establish a reliable level of communication. Our update this month is that from next month we will be updating, and that we are now on SOCIAL MEDIA because isn't that so cool? Catch ya later, alligator!"

 

[Zombra]

Nice, I thought they were going make the non-update "reward update" be the whole November post, but they're just posting it right now. Hopefully the next update with actual game design stuff will be coming sooner as well.

Update #60

Oct 1 2017

Changes to Rewards and Add-ons

Not bothering to quote the whole post because who cares? Click the link if you're so damn interested.

 

[Zombra]

Somehow I feel dirty posting these updates.

date #62

Oct 5 2017

BackerKit clarifications and website update

Dear backers,

WEBSITE IS LIVE

The website is live again. We apologize for the inconvenience. Those of you who were unable to create Forum accounts to answer the survey questions, can now go to this URL and register:

http://www.littleorbit.com/register/

NOTE: This survey question is just to help us award your Forum Badge reward. If you don't plan on using the forums, then you don't need to register, and for the survey question you can enter N/A.

TIERS & 4 EXTRA CHARACTER CLASSES

Unfortunately this is somewhat confusing and we had to go back through all the Playdek comments and BackerKit to decipher what they setup for each tier. We have adjusted the $80 tier description on BackerKit to be more accurate.

Here is what we found:

• All pledges below $80 do not come with any extra Character Classes.
• All pledges from $80 - $165 include the 4 Character Classes.
• All pledges higher than $165 include the 4 Elite Character Classes (special skin & 2 special weapons with stats).

MORE ADD-ONS LATER IN THE PROJECT

We have had several requests to offer new Add-ons including an "All Access" package that includes everything.

We will continue to discuss this, but for now we want to just focus on the project. A couple months before launch, we can work through any additional Add-ons for backers.

EXTRA COST FOR SWITCH

The difference in cost for Switch is directly related to Nintendo. Microsoft and Sony allow us to distribute codes to their games, but Nintendo charges an extra fee per code.

DON'T WORRY - YOU WILL HAVE TIME TO CHANGE YOUR SURVEYS

If you don't see your exact options up there, let us know and give us some time. We are still in pre-production, and even though we have not announced a release date for Unsung Story, we don't plan on locking the BackerKit surveys for quite a while.

SHIPPING CHARGES

We have gotten a number of messages related to the $24 shipping charges in BackerKit.

First, we apologize for this situation. Clearly Playdek did not investigate shipping options very well. We researched the least expensive international shipping option available, and this was the best we could come up with:

https://www.usps.com/international/priority-mail-international.htm

Second, for those of you at the $80 tier and below, we never collected a shipping address. When you add a Physical Add-on, you will notice the $24 shipping charge appears. However later in the process, once you enter a US address, the shipping charge will go away.

NO DRM-FREE OPTION YET

This is something we are still working on. Currently Little Orbit is not setup to distribute DRM-free copies. Right now the digital PC editions are all being distributed through Steam. However we are investigating this issue, and we will come back with more information when we have it. Once that happens backers will be able to change their selections in the surveys.

OTHER PROBLEMS?

Feel free to contact support@littleorbit.com with any other issues.

Thank you,

Little Orbit Support

1. 
   Little Orbit Creator 7 minutes ago
   @Zombra & Christopher - We understand your concerns, unfortunately this is how Playdek setup the reward tiers. We are looking at options down the road for making these available (in some form) down the road.
   
   
2. 
   Zombra 10 minutes ago
   Ugh, gated high tier game content (exclusive character classes??) is REALLY not a good look.

 

[Hyperion]

I did a double take when I saw exclusive game content for backers. That's one of the most dishonest, money grubbing tactics I've ever seen. And I've played Capcom games. There's no way you leave those unavailable to everyone, that's a terrible look for everyone in the creation of the game, whether you salvaged it or not. Just make it a challenging unlockable.

 

[Zombra]

I did a double take when I saw exclusive game content for backers. That's one of the most dishonest, money grubbing tactics I've ever seen. And I've played Capcom games. There's no way you leave those unavailable to everyone, that's a terrible look for everyone in the creation of the game, whether you salvaged it or not. Just make it a challenging unlockable.

Yeah. Of course it wasn't Little Orbit's decision. Hopefully they'll weasel around it a bit, like make Polearm Knight a reskinned Poleaxe Knight with red boots and a weapon that does +1 extra damage against mollusks.

 

[Zombra]

Update #64
Oct 7 2017

Divine Defender Concept Art

Dear Backers,

Today we are going to share the first piece of new concept art with you, but I don’t want to over hype this. Before we get washed away in a flood of comments and critiques, just remember this is just one piece of art from pre-production. I happen to like it for a number of reasons, but we’re still a long way from locking in the overall art style.

With that out of the way, I would like to take a moment and talk about the art process, pre-production, and our decision to stay with a 3D art style.

PRE-PRODUCTION
Right now there is a lot going on in the art department, but it is important to let you know we are not in full production yet. As I mentioned in our August Update, Little Orbit is starting from scratch to bring Matsuno’s design to life. This means we are in the experimental stages of pre-production, which is where we create a number of Design Documents including the Art Design Document.

The Art Design Document will eventually form the roadmap for each visual component of the game. It will spell out in great detail the techniques we need to use to create our heroes, monsters, environments, and items. It will also map out the User Interface style guide and visual elements we will use to convey information to the players. Some of this document will be technical in nature with definitions for texture sizes and polygon counts, and other parts will contain the initial length of time it took to create each type of asset, so that we can build estimates of how long it will take to complete all of the artwork we need.

The fun part of pre-production is where we bring in various external artists to submit creative ideas – concept art.

We started by reviewing all of the existing Playdek concept art, and then exploring what we liked and what we didn’t.

I want to go on record saying that there are many beautiful pieces of art that Playdek shared with the community. However, everyone on the art team shared two central problems with what was produced:

1) The pieces were overly gritty and realistic.

For myself, I kept looking back at earlier Matsuno games, and they all have a much brighter color palette with more visual fantasy elements. And while a number of the Playdek pieces are lovingly painted and hauntingly epic, they mostly portray neutral to muddy color scenes with realistic characters that could have walked right out of medieval Europe. This isn’t the vision I had at all when I first started thinking about what the spiritual successor to Final Fantasy Tactics or Tactics Ogre might look like. A quick glance at Akihiko Yoshida’s tumblr (he was the character designer on many of the original tactics games) will show you what I mean.

2) The pieces weren’t from the perspective of the game.

Many of the Playdek pieces show external views of distant locations. Again there is nothing wrong with the art itself. But none of these scenes are rendered from the proper angle or distance of a tactics game. None of them help an artist visualize battle fields or location elements that the player might interact with.

We felt it was important to stick with concept art that will help us flesh out the look and feel of the game before we dive into true production.


FULL 3D OR NOT
Given that we needed to build out our own concept art, we next had to answer a major art question: Did we want to do full 3D art, or did we want to try and stick with something closer to Final Fantasy Tactics with 2D sprites against 3D environments?

I have mentioned before that we have engaged a couple members of the Final Fantasy Tactics modding community, and two of them are pixel artists who spent time exploring the 2D approach. We had a couple renders done for each direction, but we ultimately decided for a number of reasons to stick with full 3D like Playdek originally promised.

So how do we capture the feel of a game like Final Fantasy Tactics in full 3D?

In my opinion, the goal of the Unsung Story art is to honor the games that have come before while still creating something unique and fun in its own right. We spent time analyzing the hand drawn 2D art, the pixel art, and then sketching out ideas for how that might translate into full 3D. We also reviewed the work of many classic tactics artists as well as sought contemporary inspiration.

Alongside this entire effort, our design team has been redefining each aspect of the game by going back to Matsuno’s original ideas and narrative. We felt it was important to have a fairly locked down story line, game play mechanics, and class progression before we got too far commissioning concept art.

DIVINE DEFENDER
With some of these important decisions settled, we could now start commissioning concept art. When we commission these pieces, we want them to help us visualize the following things:

• How to translate the feel of a 2D sprite into a full 3D character model
• How to create distinction without too much detail that will be lost at the size and angle this character will be on screen
• How to capture the thematic feel of the School this class / armor set comes from
• How to bring Matsuno’s original fantasy themed Unsung Story ideas to life

Here is my favorite so far that comes closest to addressing each of those issues:

Divine Defender Concept Art
The artist who submitted this piece is Tyler James, my incredibly talented Art Director on HEX: Shards of Fate. You can see more of his work on his website http://www.artofty.com/. I also want to thank iijyanaika for his feedback on the design. Iijyanaika is one of the early Art Consultant backers who signed up on the forums for access to our Art Discussion forum on the little orbit website.

Hopefully you enjoyed the sneak peek and this gives you some insight into our process moving forward. We are looking forward to showing you more as pre-production continues.

Thank you for your continued patience and support.

Sincerely, Matthew Scott

 

[Zombra]

Huh? Why are you guys sorrow-masking that one? Looks like a fairly normal update to me. Am I missing something?

 

[Abu Antar]

Huh? Why are you guys sorrow-masking that one? Looks like a fairly normal update to me. Am I missing something?

I follow this game out of curiosity, but

 

[Hyperion]

Huh? Why are you guys sorrow-masking that one? Looks like a fairly normal update to me. Am I missing something?

Think it was this line:

The pieces were overly gritty and realistic.

Huh? Why are you guys sorrow-masking that one? Looks like a fairly normal update to me. Am I missing something?

I follow this game out of curiosity, but

I didn't back it, and sat back and enjoyed the downward spiral. Based on that concept art and the fact he's involving modders who are just huge fans of the game, I don't think he's being maliciously deceitful and is trying to create a FFT2 that is extremely similar to the original, even if the nature of the story would better fit realistic models. He's just a bit too optimistic, and I think he's incorrect regarding Tactics Ogre. The portraits of the SNES / PS1 version were VERY "realistic and gritty," as is plain as day from my avatar. The fact they're trying at all on this dumpster fire shows they legitimately care about the state of the game.

 

[Zombra]

Update #65

Nov 1 2017

November General Update
Posted by Nathan Revere

Dear Backers,

Today is going to be a bit of a “general update,” by which I mean we will be covering some announcements and the nuts and bolts of our update plan moving forward. We have some fun game design stuff coming soon, but for today we need to get some important logistical stuff out of the way.

ONGOING UPDATE SCHEDULE
We are committing to a once a month update schedule. Every month, on the 1st, you will hear from us here regarding general information and game progress. We may not always have something super splashy to show, but we will make sure you always know when we do. I am making this promise to you because I believe that regular and open communication is the best way to get you guys as excited about this project as I am.

Now, to be clear, you will often hear from us more than once a month. We will have regular story, design, and art updates which will appear on our forums. I encourage anyone who is interested to "subscribe" to their favorite forums on https://littleorbit.com so they will get notified when we post. Story updates are accessible for everyone who isn’t afraid of spoilers. Design and Art updates will be posted first for consultants and premium backers to review. Then, once they have had some time to comment, we will post these on Kickstarter for everyone to enjoy (in fact, we have Story and Design updates coming in just a few days).

However, I am only going to promise monthly general updates because preparing these takes a great deal of work, and I only want to commit to something that I know we can always deliver.

FORUM SIGNUPS
Speaking of the forums, we had more than 8,000 users sign up on the Little Orbit site since 10/1. About 500 of those got caught in our site outage right at the beginning of the rush when new BackerKit surveys went out. For those users, their activation email never got sent out, so if this happened to you, please try coming back and re-signing up to gain forum access.

Of those who have signed up successfully, over half of our registered users have now been assigned their Forum Badge and backer access to the forums based on their reward tier. We're still working on the others. There are a lot of accounts to go through, so please be patient. If you don't see your badge or have access to the forums, please message us at support@littleorbit.com. We will get you straightened out.

FORUM ACCESS & WAIVERS
Thank you for all the feedback from our Art and Design Consultants on the forums!

We have taken many of your comments to heart and are moving forward with your feedback in mind. As part of this process, some of you have reached out to us with concerns that too many ideas were being thrown out from Design and Art consultants, and were worried there could be possible legal problems for the project down the road. To that end (and for everyone’s peace of mind), we have added a special waiver to the Story, Design, and Art forums. Backers who have access to those forums can still read everything they want without signing anything. But, in order to post or comment to these special forums, backers must first agree to the waiver.

BACKERKIT
We sent out 16,200 BackerKit surveys, but have so far only received 12,700 responses. This means that we have nearly 3,500 people who haven’t responded yet. We realize that it's now well over 3.5 years since the original Kickstarter campaign ended. We need as many of you as possible to fill out those surveys so we can get you taken care of. If you know someone who backed the project but has stopped checking Unsung Story updates, it would be incredibly helpful if you can let them know that things are moving forward once again. We don’t want anyone who backed to fall through the cracks, so be sure to let everyone know to fill out those surveys!

DRM-FREE
Speaking of BackerKit, we are excited to announce that we have worked out all the details and can now offer a DRM-Free version of the game. We have added DRM-Free versions for Windows, OSX, and Linux to your surveys. If you would like one of those, please make sure to change your selection accordingly.

Thank you for your continued patience and support.

Sincerely, Matthew Scott

 

[Zombra]

Wow, as vaporous as this project has been, the following summary of what they met about this week looks really solid. These guys have a plan.

Dec 1 2017

December General Update

Dear Backers,

G'Day from Australia!

Last month was largely dominated by pre-production again, and we've had a number of exciting work streams making excellent progress. I'll be posting Design Update #2 and one other update in a couple days, but over the last couple weeks it became increasingly clear that a face-to-face with the entire team would be hugely beneficial.

So November ended with a trip to visit our developer, Torus Games, in the beautiful city of Melbourne, Australia. Several team members from Torus have already introduced themselves on our forums and answered some questions. For those that don't know, Torus in based in Bayswater just outside of Melbourne, which is 19 hours ahead of Orange County where Little Orbit is based. I flew out of LAX over the holiday on November 22nd and arrived on November 24th. I planned for a couple days of jetlag recovery over the weekend before jumping into meetings, and I'm still here till Monday, December 4th.

Before you rush off to google Torus, like Little Orbit they have worked on a lot of licensed based games with tight timeframes and small budgets. It's a studio of ~30 developers, and like Little Orbit they are looking forward to showing backers and future fans the amazing work they can do on Unsung Story.

The major goal of the trip was to sync up with all the teams on their various milestones so far and to get to an agreed scope and timeline - which we now have.

Make sure to read to the bottom of this update for the release date of the game.

Over the next couple weeks, we'll be sharing some specifics and interviews with key staff, but in the meantime I thought I would structure this update around the general topics and areas we focused on for the trip so far.

TEAM MEETING DAY 1 - NOVEMBER 28TH

Story. Story. Story. This is a major part of the game, and we felt it was the best way to jump in there. The game was originally envisioned with 5 distinct chapters that each followed a different "Story Character" and bounced around in history. We are sticking to that formula, and last month on our littleorbit.com Story forums, we posted our first Story update to discuss some of the challenges presented by the unfinished work. If you aren't afraid of spoilers and want to read it, you have to login first, but can see it here: https://littleorbit.com/forums/topic/unsung-story-narrative-introduction/

The non-spoiler summary is:

"Unsung Story takes place in a medieval fantasy world where spells are cast as songs, and magic can reshape reality. With the threat of such power, the original shapers created a way to stabilize the world. Since the beginning of time, History has been sung and recorded in magical schools around the world. The game opens at the end of a 77-Year War. We follows a squad of aging heroes as they are given a covert mission: to infiltrate the archive of a nearby school and cast a legendary spell that may turn the tide of the conflict."

We spent all day in two separate workshops with a combination of lead producers, designers, artists, and developers. We covered the drafts of Chapter 2, Chapter 3, and Chapter 4 that we feel are faithful to Matsuno's vision but still fit the new structure of our game (there is a major change in how our story is told). We are also halfway through drafts of Chapter 1 and some of Chapter 5, but these chapters will go much slower because they are a bit more complicated. Each chapter identifies the Story Character(s), themes, major encounters, candidate missions, locations, and some dialogue.

TEAM MEETING DAY 2 - NOVEMBER 29TH

Day #2 was split between Art and Programming.

In the first half of Wednesday, we spent time reviewing inspirations for characters, weapons, armor, environments, UIs, animations, and VFX. Honestly I felt we were pretty well nailed down on the art design and approach, but the dev team came up with lots of good questions involving how render swappable inventory, playable races, monsters and other areas. We've got a number of new pre-production deliverables now to help us flesh those out, and we're looking forward to sharing progress soon.

I can definitely share that one focus of the new UI is to try and get away from Tactics' menu-based approach. The team is working up several different ideas on how we can keep the classic feel without the depth of menus that slowed down gameplay.

The second half of the day was focused on technology and progress building the Tactics game engine itself. Lots of less interesting discussions about data formats, system editors, grid/movement management, AI, and more.

The approach for these two teams couldn’t be more opposite. Art is trying out lots of experimental ideas and concepts to fully explore the world of the game, but Programming is laser focused on getting the basic Tactics gameplay up and running as quickly as possible.

TEAM MEETING DAY 3 - NOVEMBER 30TH

Day #3 focused on Game Mechanics and Sound.

We spent the better part of the day going through the initial candidate list of 20 classes (not including the Elite classes) spread across our 4 different schools - Mana, Nature, Divine, and Technology. This game rests squarely on the classes, abilities, and spells, and it's an area I want to nail down early, so we have the maximum amount of time to integrate the game mechanics into each chapter.

I was pleasantly surprised with how far the team has come in a fairly short time, but I want to warn backers now that we did take a complete step back and start from scratch when conceptualizing the classes for Unsung Story. That means we may or may not use the original proposed names and concepts that Playdek announced like Ballast Knight or Orb Guard.

Here are the design pillars we are using to help guide our approach to classes:

• Players can mix-and-match classes to make their own Primary and Secondary combinations. That means each individual class should have a single, clear mechanical focus. However, their focus can’t be too niche to be realistically useful.
• Classes should a single clear, tight thematic within our world.
• Classes should have a simple and memorable name.
• Classes should mix-and-match in the player's party with different units in interesting ways.
• No class should feel irrelevant. However, classes shouldn’t necessarily be perfectly balanced. It’s okay for some combinations of classes to be extremely powerful compared to others. As players explore the class system, they should be rewarded with extremely powerful combinations. This shouldn’t be immediately obvious or too easy to come by.
• Classes should utilize physical space (tiles) in a more interesting way than previous tactics games, however, they shouldn’t all focus on this mechanic.
• Musical terms/motifs should be used very lightly They’re a subtle touch, not a defining feature.

We spent some time working through the first two classes that are unlocked at the beginning of the game, and how those classes can act as a tutorial by helping players engage in core game play mechanics. I look forward to sharing some of these classes and their core game play soon.

The audio workshop ranged from music to sfx, dialog, and voice over. Largely we are still hoping to deliver a musical score from Sakimoto, but we aren't in a position to announce any details yet. My favorite part was a fun brainstorm on the many types of sound that could be used to generate magical effects in the game.

TEAM MEETING DAY 4 - DECEMBER 1ST

This was our final full day of meetings for the week, and the focus was entirely on attempting to nail down a release date that we could stand behind.

The day started with going through each month and identifying all of the game's components, and we spent time going through notes from the previous days adjusting the milestone schedule.

When are we releasing Unsung Story?

This has been the #1 question asked by backers, and in light of this project's history, I felt we needed to spend a fair amount of time going through the game's scope, timeline, and deliverables, before we made any formal announcement. We are going to continue refining the project timeline through the end of the year, but at this time we will be simultaneously releasing all platforms in Q4 2019.

That's it for now.

Thank you for your continued patience and support.

Sincerely, Matthew Scott

 

[Zombra]

I stopped reading these a while ago, but they exist. Here's another update!

Update #69

Jan 1 2018

January Update

Dear backers,

Happy New Years!

With the all the holidays, this was a shorter month for us, so I have combined the General Update with another Character Concept below for a single update. Make sure to read to the bottom so you don’t miss it. I'm hoping to make a significant announcement later in January.

Story

We are on track to have a completed new outline for all 5 chapters by the 31st. This is an exciting milestone because so many of the future milestones depend on it, and I am super pleased with it so far.

I like to approach the story in layers. The goal is always to get to a complete outline as soon as possible, so you know your beginning, middle, and end - which we had for the most part with Matsuno's work. But then we end up doing several iterations that each focus on a different aspect of the story. This first draft was solely focused on piecing the story together and solving design problems. The next one will focus on the High Concept and unique world building elements that have emerged from filling in the holes. After that we'll focus specifically on incorporating game design elements like character classes and the magic system back into the world. etc.

Design

Right before the holiday break, the team delivered the Design Direction Document, which is a precursor to the full Game Design Document. The DDD captured a lot of the notes and design recommendations from our November meetings and attempted to organize the whole design in high level terms. This document had breaks every section for me to fill in my own notes or comments to help refine the ideas. The full Game Design Document will build on this and add specific game flow screens, full class breakdowns, equipment itemization, and level walkthroughs.

Here are some of the items from the table of contents:

• Gameplay loop and overview
• Narrative and Main Characters
• Combat Design Pillars
• Level Design
• User Interface Approach
• Stats Overview
• Character Progression
• Weapon Types
• and more

Development

The engineering team has started work building our Tactics engine.

During some of their initial testing, we built the notes on the Triangle Grid, which I posted last month. I typically refer to this early part of engineering as the "Ugly Duckling" stage, because the engineers get very little art support. However these first couple of demos are very important for exploring game mechanics and systems, so I'm looking forward to them.

Art

I saved this one for last. Lots of work is going on with this group including building the first couple 3D models to try and capture the final look and feel.

We also have another Character Concept that I feel comfortable sharing. We are calling this one our Mana Attacker (for the school and role she is from). This class deals a lot of ranged spell damage, and we’re toying with making her PlayDek’s “War Mage”, but none of the class names are final right now.

For this concept we wanted to go the exact opposite of our Divine Defender. This is our first exploration into the Mana school with a female character not wearing armor.

Thank you for your continued patience and support.

Sincerely, Matthew Scott

 

[Talby]

So I guess in the end it really was an unsung story. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯