Unsung Story
Mercenary Job Design Doc
The Mercenary Design Doc is now available to everyone on our Discord. Come join the conversation and let us know your thoughts! For those of you who don't use Discord, you can also download the PDF directly here.
Our next Design Doc will be available on Discord to backers on the 29th.
As always, I appreciate your patience and support.
Sincerely, Matthew Scott
New design elements & feedback process
It's September 2021! The world is a very different place than it was when we started in August 2017. For better or worse, we have been on this journey together with our Kickstarter community for more than 4 years.
During that time, there's been a lot of learning on our side, and last year we produced Chapter 1. Clearly we missed the mark in a lot of places. Since then we have taken some pretty big steps to listen and address the feedback we received. This has included core design changes that go well beyond UI or art tweaks.
Last week, as the work on the design started to settle down, I tasked the team with coming up with a schedule that would allow us to share our direction in a way that would allow the community to weigh in before we got too far along (like last time). As part of this, we thought through how to do right by those of you that backed with a desire to be involved in the design process. Backers in the Design Tier have stated they would love to discuss things with any community member who has an interest in the design of the game. With that in mind, any backer on our discord can request to be part of those channels regardless of the tier they backed the game at.
Design Pillars
Before I jump into the schedule, I wanted to start by sharing the short list of goals that the design team organized early this year. Many of these concepts came from or were inspired by feedback we got from the community, and we have been using this list as a filter for helping us redesign elements of the game to be better.
Here they are:
- Every choice should matter in a battle
- Jobs should have unique skills
- Jobs should be fun to experiment with and use
- Combining Jobs should offer emergent roles
- Combining Jobs with the right characters should offer power boosts
- Player progression should be meaningful and rewarding
- Make sure systems or status effects are being used across at least 2-3 Jobs (with the possible exception of a specific status effect built to support a Job’s play pattern)
- Systems should logically build on each other
- Find and build on the fun in what is working
- Make sure we are only changing things for a compelling reason
Feedback Schedule
The Design Team will be releasing a new in-progress design that you as a community will be able to see and comment on every two weeks.
During week #1, we will be releasing these on our community Discord. Follow the steps listed in the unsung-announcements channel if you are a backer who wants access and doesn’t already have it.
During week #2, we will be posting the information for the broader community and make the design docs available to everyone. Please feel free to post comments on the update or join our Discord to discuss more in depth.
The intention of this approach will give our design folks an early period where they get exclusive eyes on the design and can comment, discuss, and give feedback, while also keeping our broader community informed. We hope you will be as excited to dive into the nitty-gritty as we are to share some of our in-progress design work.
In fact, our first document is up today!
Here is a peek at some proposed UI changes for Harmony System from that document:
If you are a KS backer, you can visit the discord right now for a look at how we are changing the Harmony System, Class Systems, and more. Again, you can join our Discord at https://discord.gg/littleorbit.
As always, I appreciate your patience and support.
Sincerely, Matthew Scott
August 2021
I know it has been a while since our last update so, to honor my promise to keep you regularly apprised of our progress with Unsung, I felt it was time to roll up my sleeves and just dive in. The truth is, we’ve been wanting to put out an update for a while, but we are currently deep in the weeds on a number of redesigns and rewrites. This is a difficult part of game design to talk about because it is not only critical to the success of Unsung but also probably not that interesting for you all to read about (unless you really, really like spreadsheets). Still, today I would like to cover in more detail the 3 main areas we are iterating on (as introduced in my last update): Character Classes, Story, and Cutscenes.
Character Classes
As feedback on the Chapter 1 build and our internal audits both showed, our current classes needed an overhaul to ensure that each has a unique identity, offers emergent gameplay when combined with other classes, and are ultimately fun to use. With that in mind, our design team has continued to refine the class system.
Our initial thought was that we would tackle classes the same way we plan to release the story—chapter by chapter. This proved to be flawed because it prevented us from looking at the classes holistically and building those critical synergies that make for an amazing tactical experience. For that reason, in addition to improving our existing designs, the design team has been making a spreadsheet that breaks down each of our classes by type, shared mechanics, and points of synergy across the entire game.
Taking the time to do this work up front gives us the following benefits:
- It allows for improved level design. By building out all of our class details, we can ensure that there are interesting synergies and challenges every time you engage in combat.
- It allows us to more easily tune our power curves for challenge and complexity.
- It allows us to make sure the emergent gameplay elements we are targeting play well across many classes throughout the game instead of just with those that appear at the same time as the given class.
Unfortunately, as critical as this work is, it is not easy to show the work in progress. There’s a lot of back and forth at the office as the team works through all the different elements they have to keep in mind while making these documents. We have another big meeting next week, and I am looking forward to seeing more of their progress then.
Story
As we have been doing our class-rework, similar care has been put towards our narrative elements. This has been happening on both a micro and a macro level. Top down, we are in the midst of an audit of the entire story arc, beat-by-beat, to make sure each chapter features exciting moments though both level design set pieces and narrative hooks. Bottom up, we are going through the dialogue to raise the level of our prose and inject more character into each line. This is a significant task. To give you some idea, the script for Chapter 1 alone is 107 pages long and has a little over 12 thousand words.
Cutscenes
Speaking of characters, the last big area we have been focusing on is dialogue presentation. As I mentioned last time, we have moved away from a 3D talking head approach towards a traditional JRPG presentation with full character portraits. A big part of a modern portrait system is the use of expression and emotion instead of just a single bust to convey characterization. The art team has been working closely with the narrative team to figure out what kinds of poses we will need for each of our character portraits to best support our major story beats.
Last time I showed you some dialogue examples featuring hand-painted busts of Greymore and Sirena. Today, I can share some of our work-in-progress emotions for Greymore as well:
That’s it for this month. I know it continues to take time, but I truly believe that Unsung will be a better game for this work.
As always, I appreciate your patience and support.
Sincerely, Matthew Scott
May 2021 - Progress update and talking about talking
I hope everyone is starting to see light at the end of the tunnel with this pandemic. If you are in any of the countries that we see still struggling, know that our thoughts are with you.
It's been a bit since my last update, so I thought I would fill everyone in on where we are - both as a studio and with Unsung. I'll have some fun artwork to talk through at the end of this update, so stick with me.
Studio Update
I think it's important to acknowledge that the studio is just swamped right now, and my own time has been severely limited from interacting with the players and our community. I'm hoping that will shift soon.
We currently have seven titles in some stage of development not including projects that are on the back burner right now like Fallen Earth.
They fall into 3 categories:
- Backlogged titles close to being finished
- Development titles that we are being paid to make
- Unsung Story
For category one, we have 3 nearly completed projects that are all blocked in some way from being released. Some of these like the APB engine upgrade and Descent have been previously announced. One of them hasn't. Each of them has had significant investment, but also has a significant issue preventing us from proceeding. It is excruciating to be so close on so many fronts. It just means that at some point we are going to have a steady stream of new Little Orbit games every couple months.
For category two, we have 3 development projects that are work-for-hire. Two are short term and should ship before the end of this year, and one is targeting next year. As the CEO, I try to balance the development work, because I don't want to take away too much focus on our own stuff, but these projects give us more financial stability.
And then there is Unsung Story.
That's been a passion project for us since 2017, and after the Chapter 1 Early Access release I recognized that it still needs a bit of work before we can jump back into full production.
I know that this project has had a lot of bad history with the previous developer jumping off into other titles that were supposed to fund Unsung. In keeping with this month's theme about "talking", I assure you that this isn't just a lot of talk with no action. In the past, that didn't work out so well, so I want to point out several key differences between what we're doing and what has occurred in the past:
- We have already publicly released the Chapter 1 Early Access builds and more are on their way.
- We are continuing work on Unsung - even while the studio handles other projects. I'll talk about some of that progress today.
- Our development projects aren't speculative. In the past, the previous developer diverted Unsung funds into a different project, gambling that it would generate enough income for them to switch back. That's not the case here. Our development projects are fully funded and generating revenue for us.
- Lastly, the extra time we are taking since the beginning of 2021 is helping us to go back and adjust some core elements that received negative criticism to improve the overall game.
Finally, I am painfully aware how long this project is taking to come to fruition, and I'm very much committed to getting a large updated to Early Access in your hands as soon as possible with Chapter 2 very soon after that.
General Update
This month I'm going to touch on topics from my February and March updates. You can read the February update here which covers the 7 main feedback items from the Early Access build. And you can read the March update here which talked about some progress on those items.
This is a list of progress that we have made since then:
1. Significant design re-work.
I mentioned in March that we had shifted the design team around. Ultimately this is our first big tactics game, so this process has been quite a bit bigger than I expected as we take lessons learned and adjust things. This has been a system by system examination to determine whether they are achieving what we wanted.
We analyzed all 25 jobs and found 4 jobs have Sleep skills, 5 jobs have Rage skills, 6 jobs have Stun skills, 9 jobs have Evasion skills, 10 jobs have Healing skills, and 11 jobs have Hinder skills.
That analysis revealed the following problems:
- Skills are too similar diffusing the uniqueness of jobs
- Jobs have too many skills reducing the need to switch jobs as play progresses
- Many jobs lack a central game mechanic which means they become hybrids of other jobs
- Not enough variation for gameplay
With that in mind we have already started going back through each job to pair down and focus things.
The new design goals are:
- Preserve the existing design where ever possible
- Find the fun is what is working
- Each job needs to have unique skills
- Offer emergent roles through combining jobs
- Offer power boosts through combining the right characters with the right jobs
This month we completed our first pass on this entire effort.
2. Significant story re-work.
As we started the design analysis and tried to jump into level designs, it became clear that some of the story elements were too intricate to allow the level designers enough creative latitude to build fun levels. Since March, we have been taking a red pen through the storyline and streamlining things a bit more. This effort is now complete, which has now given design a super clear set of areas where they can start evaluating Chapter 2 level designs again.
Additionally it has let our narrative team collaborate with the design team to plan where to introduce each enemy type / new mechanic for the player to defeat and then open a new job in the Opus.
3. Finishing Female job models and animations.
Progress on this item was a little slower than I had hoped. We should be complete with the final rigging and animations by the end of May.
4. UI changes to the Opus.
This is still ongoing. We have some User Experience comps that are pretty good. But we are continuing to polish before we start implementing.
"Talking" Dialog Presentation
For this month, I want to spend some time going through one of the other areas we have been working on and talk about talking.
In February and March I mentioned feedback surrounding the cutscenes and dialog. Back in that update, we decided to ditch the talking 3D heads. It was clearly a failed idea. Since then we have shifted to a more traditional JRPG presentation with full portraits of our characters on each line in different emotional poses to convey a bit more drama with less distraction.
This effort required us to find an external art team to do conceptual designs for each of the story characters and then hand paint their dialog poses.
I thought it would be fun to share the development of these concepts and then comps of the new dialog system. Some of this is still work in progress, so bear with me.
Here is some of our work on Maestro Greymore.
Greymore Sketches
Greymore Final
Here is some work on Lady Sirena.
Lady Sirena Sketches
Lady Sirena Final
And finally, some dialog examples.
Greymore Dialogue Example
Sirena Dialogue Example
That's it for this month. Even though I'm not doing updates on the 1st, I'll try to avoid long spans of silence in the future.
As always, I appreciate your patience and support.
Sincerely, Matthew Scott
February Feedback
It's February, so I thought I would give a small update on what we have been working on for the next release to Early Access. To start, I want to thank our backers and Early Access players who have submitted feedback. We took your words to heart and spent some time internally processing through each note we received on the discord or on our forums. For now, we have paused work on Chapter 2 in order to properly address the large reoccurring themes that came up. I want to cover a few of those today.
1. The main character doesn't have a unique look.
I'll take the blame for this one. Part of the central theme of this game is "Unsung Heroes," or people who had a huge impact but who are lost to time, so we don't really know what they looked like. That narrative seed inspired us to add something that very few other tactics games offer: a customization system. We thought it would be really cool to have that theme reflected in the mechanics of character creation itself.
As a central figure of the game and the core around which several of our themes develop, we took the same customization approach with Rime, our main character. Looking over our feedback, I think this pushed a little too far outside player expectations without delivering on the narrative synergy we had hoped, especially since Unsung Story is meant to be a spiritual successor to Final Fantasy Tactics. The tactics genre overall is often very heavy on narrative, so there is a long and storied history of unique-looking main characters for players to follow. By unintentionally removing the hook of a visually distinct and developed character, we undermined one of the main levers we have to draw players into the story.
We spent some time discussing this issue and, based on a few other changes we would also like to make, we have decided to do a custom design for Rime and lock in his look. We already planned to do this for all of the other major story characters, so it makes sense to add Rime to that category instead of treating him as a generic unit. All of your other units will remain visually customizable, so we can still stay true to the Unsung Hero theme mechanically, but this approach also gives us a better hook to draw people into the story.
2. Characters seem to have stereotypical motivations and flat characterization in the narrative.
First off, I want to say that we hear you. Many of these issues were also brought up before by a small batch of external testers before the Beta, so I can't really say I was surprised to see it in the feedback. When we were working on this first chapter, we felt it most important to get the game into your hands so we could start these sorts of discussions rather than push things back yet again. The bones are there, but we know the writing itself needs work. Listening to your feedback has led to some very cool writing discussions with the team, and we have already begun the process of polishing and improving on our major story beats. I personally love how the changes are coming along, and I hope you all will appreciate the improvement as well.
3. Dialog has too much exposition and cutscenes feel flat.
Now some of this could be from item #2, but generally speaking, no one liked the animating heads during cutscenes. It was another experiment we implemented to allow players to see Rime's customizations more often. Unfortunately, in the end, I think the moving heads were just too distracting. We went back to the drawing board and have come up with something I think players will like a bit better. I think this new strategy will also make our cutscenes a bit more compelling.
4. Where can I mix and match jobs? Why are all the tactics options missing?
During development and narrative planning, we made a choice along the way to tease the Opus Hub and wait till after Mission 4 to pay that off. Unfortunately, many players only played the first 2 missions and then gave up when they couldn't figure out how upgrade, buy equipment, or change jobs. You can see that in the reviews. Players who spent only 1 hour or less generally rated the game worse than players who stuck with it longer. So again, we put on our thinking caps and found a better solution.
We are reworking the early levels to allow customization access much sooner, but will be unlocking the features of the Opus Hub a little at a time instead of all at once. This has several advantages. First, we give people access to the good stuff sooner, thereby increasing early mission strategy and showcasing the game’s potential right off the bat. Second, by opening features periodically, we avoid the all-or-nothing approach which may have been a bit overwhelming for some players. Finally third, this gives us opportunities to tutorialize our systems in a natural and engaging way.
5. The Opus Hub looks cool, but I don't like the movement system and it's difficult to find the feature I'm looking for.
This was another experiment (sensing a theme yet?). Originally, we thought the free motion system would be a nice change of pace versus the tile movement system, allowing players to explore the environment and have fun. The Opus Hub itself also used to be larger. It has gone through many iterations in how it looks and how it is laid out. To meet our development needs, the room was eventually simplified to the point where there isn't much to explore. Furthermore, this first Early Access version only had name plates above the heads of Opus Hub characters, which led to further confusion and difficulty navigating quickly and cleanly to the vendors players wanted to use.
Since many of the gains from our free motion system are now vestigial, we're going to do something different. We're keeping our environment and characters, but everything will be driven by a menu system that can provide better explanations and faster access to what the player is looking for. The Opus screens themselves were work-in-progress to expose the game's various systems anyway, so now is a good opportunity to revamp the UI and smooth things out.
6. The jobs have cool abilities, but XYZ job feels under powered with only a few abilities, while ABC job is OP and has a lot of abilities.
Couldn't agree more with this feedback. We thought the Early Access build had some newer balance updates, but they didn’t make it in. Additionally, the distribution of abilities across jobs is pretty uneven. That will absolutely be addressed.
7. It’s a shame I can't make a female unit.
As I mentioned in the Early Access notes, we were working on the female heads, hair, and job outfits when that build launched. Those are now completed, so players will have access to them soon.
As I wrap up, I hope you noticed a theme behind each of these items. For each, they involved experiments that stuck (or didn’t), but which ultimately helped reveal a better way forward. That is the true strength of systems like Early Access and Kickstarter. They allow us, with your help, to pursue iterative designs on a scale that wouldn’t be feasible in-house. Thank you all for joining us on this journey, and I hope you will keep your feedback coming as we continue to add new pieces for you to enjoy. Together, we will make the final game even better!
As always, I appreciate your patience and support.
Sincerely, Matthew Scott
Early Access Update & Matsuno - Jan 6 2021
Hopefully, everyone had a restful and safe holiday. We are now back in the office, and this will be my first post-Early Access update.
New backers have been jumping onboard through Steam and the feedback is rolling in. I want to thank everyone who has taken time to play the game in this early state and let us know your thoughts on discord or on the forums.
We have been paying very close attention to the areas that feel roughest to players across narrative presentation, main characters, dialog, combat, and hub features. Some of these rough spots are because various supporting systems aren’t yet in at this early stage, but some of these edges are the kind that only come into view under player scrutiny. We already have several improvements in the pipeline that we think will address many of the pain points which you all have helpfully pointed out. I don’t want to go into full detail on those changes just yet until we are further along in development, but I am excited about these improvements and I think you guys will be pleasantly surprised as well.
Speaking of feedback, I do want to take some time to address a topic that has generated a fair amount of discussion:
Matsuno’s involvement in Unsung Story.
When we took on the project, one of the big things we wanted to do was bring the spirit of Matsuno’s original design to life. If you haven’t been following along with our Kickstarter updates until recently, I gave a pretty comprehensive overview of the project and its history during the Q&A of our First Playable Livestream:
[previewyoutube="eLOKteYbDxc;full"]
Many of you may have seen his recent Twitter thread that went up after the game was released on Early Access.
After seeing the series of tweets, I immediately reached out to Matsuno for clarification.
Here are the important points he and I agreed on:
- Matsuno produced seven sizable documents for Playdek that detailed high level game concepts, narrative timelines, story beats, prominent characters, screen layouts, combat mechanics, and other game design elements. All of these were used during the production of the game.
- Matsuno has not been involved day-to-day with my team - just myself during 2018 both in person and over email as we clarified his work and attempted to solve some missing pieces.
- We had hoped that 'from the imagination of' would characterize his involvement, but without the day-to-day control over the final product, he feels uncomfortable with his name being used so prominently in connection with the game.
- Moving forward, based on his feelings and feedback from players, we are going to remove his name from our marketing. Those changes have already been made on Steam, YouTube, our website, and other places.
- We agreed that absolutely nothing is changing with the game itself. Matsuno will still be credited for his various contributions, and the game is moving forward exactly as planned. This is purely a change for marketing.
Our intention was not to mislead anyone or unduly capitalize on his name, and I apologize if that occurred. Hopefully, this decision makes sense to all the backers and they don’t feel like they are losing anything.
As always, I appreciate your patience and support.
Sincerely, Matthew Scott