Describing how close a game project is to completion when it’s at any non-extreme stage is a bit tricky. But since using words to explain things to customers is literally half of what I’m paid for, and Arvind vetoed my idea of flying out individually to each of your houses to explain it with hand gestures and YouTube clips, I’m gonna give it a crack.
At present, Unrest is simultaneously…
25% done…in that one-fourth of the game is completely playable and (give or take a few hundred thousand rounds of playtesting and memos and increasingly obscure, nigh quantum, glitches) working as intended. Which is to say, if we were to ship you a demo version, it would include one-fourth of the game—pretty much Chapters 1 and 2 (out of 7 chapters, a brief prologue, and a brief epilogue).
60-70% done…in that more than half of the dialogue, scripting, and art assets are finished. In some categories, that’s even a bit conservative. This stuff doesn’t factor into that last estimate because while it’s all, in theory, ready to be combined, it’s hanging in limbo while our team members tighten the rest.
More percent done…in the sense of, if you drew a line from the point when Arvind said, “Hey, let’s make another videogame” after the release of Will Fight for Food to the theoretical point where the game will be released, we’d be right up against the end-part. But that’s because game development is weird. Wrap your head around this: none of the art assets, dialogue, or even specific story flowcharts we wrote before June 2013 will be in the final product. Everything currently in our game is the result of many, many months of iterative design and revisions.
Now, here are pictures. These are exclusive screenshots. I know that because I took them ten minutes before this post went up.
Those were the screenshots. Now, in administrative news:
Sherlock Holmes once said, “When you eliminate all other explanations, what remains—however improbable—must be true.” While his methods are as sound now as they were during The Case of the Counterfeit Slim Shady, they’re also pretty time-consuming. This is why we only eliminated like one or two rational explanations before concluding that the Illuminati is personally interfering with the development of Unrest.
“But Rutskarn!” you cry (except for the Sherlock Holmes purists, who are thumbing through their omnibuses with a deepening scowl of abused trust); “The Illuminati don’t exist! They’re a fantasy made up by people daydreaming about organized, functional, basically cooperative government!” And before the past few months, we would have agreed with you—but I have a feeling that once you see our evidence, you, too, will agree that they are one possible loose explanation of a lukewarmly-unusual phenomenon.
Over the past six months Arvind has sent routine petitions to two or three world governments, and every time, they manage to screw things up profoundly. They send his papers back with one binary option marked incorrect, and when he picks the other option, they mark it incorrect again. A submission is returned without the (somewhat expensive to procure) documentation inside it, which finally arrives (in its own battered, torn packaging) several months later smelling vaguely of the harbor. Then he applied for a visa to travel to Rezzed in March and got one that expired in February. Average complaints turnaround process: seven days, another trip to the embassy, and an ever-growing suspicion that Brazil was a documentary.
This is to bring us around to the only possible way all of this might inconvenience you, the backer: our monthly stream is going to be postponed while we deal with some overhead. We’ll have another post with the new date soon.
As always: got a question? Post ‘em below.
-Rutskarn
Posted In: Unrest