It’s been a terribly busy month for the team, and we’re chock-a-bursting with updates and content to deliver to you.
Firstly, and most excitingly, we’ve procured a booth at EGX Rezzed 2014! Almost our entire team will be there, many of them—all of them, really—meeting for the first time in person. The trip and reservations are coming out of our own pockets, but we’d nonetheless like to credit the Kickstarter for making it happen. We wouldn’t have risked the investment without the faith our backers gave us.
Speaking of conventions, Arvind talked a little bit about the game in this NGDC interview, most of which is spent trying to explain the concept of an indie dev doing something besides a free-to-play mobile game to a politely incredulous reporter. He also gave some talks about game development and crowdfunding, which will be uploaded at some point in the future.
We’re continuing to make brisk progress with our levels and scriptwork. So far things seem to be pretty much on schedule. I’d share screenshots, but anything I posted from the new levels would be outdated pretty much instantly, because Mikk has been polishing these up to a mirror shine. But you can get a sneak peek at the new stuff, and enjoy talky-time with the developers, during this Sunday’s scheduled Livestream. Just head over to www.livestream.com/chocolatehammer on Sunday, December 8th, at 3PM GMT to check on how things have come on since the last time! Also, to ask Arvind what kind of fabulous elk-sweat hair gel he uses.
We’ve got another interesting stream in mind for a little later on this month—something that’ll interest the tabletop gamers especially.
But for everyone else, please settle in with a blanket and your favorite stuffed animal for this month’s Storytime with Arvind.
Storytime with Arvind, Part 1: The Logo
From this update onwards, we’re going to have sections where we discuss our creative process. The history of our logo is also tied in to the history of the game, so that feels like a good place to start.
The story of the logo starts a very long time ago, when Mikk and Rutskarn were not even born (read: had not joined the team). It started with me, Ian, and our old artist discussing the logo for what was at that point an entirely different game. Here’s what one of the earliest logo sketches looked like:
Rutskarn’s analysis: ideal for a late-90s narrative adventure game, probably with FMV.
Back then Unrest was supposed to be a story about a three-sided conflict between an Indian city, a Chinese city, and a forest-dwelling Naga Empire. That concept was pretty crazy, and would probably have needed a Bethesda-level budget to execute well. The direction was also very high-fantasy, as compared to the low-fantasy, grounded-in-the-real-world direction we’d later settle on. The logo we finally settled on for that unrealized project looked like this:
Rutskarn’s analysis: ideal for a 2006 Runescape ripoff that went bankrupt in 2009.
At that time we had zero money, and what little money we got from Will Fight for Food (which you should vote for on Steam Greenlight, by the way) had run dry. We couldn’t really afford to iterate on the design; all we could afford was to touch it up and turn it into this.
Rutskarn’s analysis: ideal for a modern, modestly successful F2P match-three puzzler with RPG elements.
After a few months, our old artist left the project due to certain disagreements. I was pretty sad and didn’t know what to do (cue violin music), except that I wanted Unrest to continue. This was the point where I took what we had, reworked it, and produced a new design and world document that closely resembles the Unrest of today.
I found Mikk (our current artist) via a Reddit post I had made out of desperation, and after a month or so of work, I decided that (a) simultaneously writing and programming the game was too much for me, (b) I wasn’t that good at writing anyway, and (c) I could probably find a better writer since all of them are basically unemployed all the time. With that in mind, I hit up Rutskarn on twitter and sent him a presentation of the game (which we can’t include now because it has the outline of an earlier version of the game in flowchart form). Rutskarn agreed to hop on the bandwagon, and as development progressed, we realized that the old logo wasn’t really representative of the new game at all.
To remedy that, I picked up Paint.NET and made a hackjob simplified version of the previous logo, which, horrifyingly enough, was until recently our actual logo.
Rutskarn’s analysis: ideal for the seventh-place finisher in a Dragon Age total conversion contest.
Now, we skip forward in our story a bit to a month ago from now, where practically every single human being (and a good portion of wildlife) in the entire world had told me how much our previous logo sucked. Mikk and I went back and forth for a week turning out new logos, and after much pain and suffering, this was the basic outline we settled on:
Rutskarn’s analysis: now we’re getting somewhere.
A little more art magic by Mikk, and our new logo came into being. As an expert in all forms of art critique, I think it looks pretty. 
Stay tuned for more!
Posted In: Unrest