Unsung Story - Updates

There have been a few updates for Unsung Story in the last few months. There was an update in August touching upon character classes, story and cut-scenes.

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 wholistically 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.

And there is one in september on the design process, which mentions the 4 year design process after Little Orbit took over, but the game  has been in development a couple of year before that as well and was supposed to release in 2015.

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

And if you are interested in reading design documents, you can find one here.