If screen shaking makes you uncomfortable, I suggest you don’t watch this: http://www.gfycat.com/OilyPopularAlbertosaurus
If you’re attending Rezzed, drop by Stand 12 and say hi!
Streaming!
We are/were streaming here. Ask questions, check out our progress, let Arvind try to sell you a t-shirt.
Teaser Trailer, Ch3 Nearly Done, Stream, EGX Rezzed
No big updates–Chapter 3’s almost finished, everything else continues pretty much according to plan. But we do have a new teaser trailer showing off some of our environments and interface elements on YouTube, and if you’ve got one minute and one second to kill, we’ve got just the one minute and one second to kill it with.
Notice how those trees are moving? That was so brutally hard that our team doesn’t even want to talk about it. Making games is weird, man.
Want to see Unrest live without breaking into Arvind’s house and guessing his password (currently oppan_gabenstyle)? Come to our stream next Sunday at 3PM GMT! Alternately, get your ticket to EGX Rezzed–running in Birmingham from March 28-30–and see the developers who aren’t me in person! I mean, if that’s the sort of thing you’d like to do. I wouldn’t take any offense. I wouldn’t take much offense. I wouldn’t actually do anything about it, anyway, is what I’m getting at.
See you guys Sunday!
-Ruts
Stream, Interview, M-m-merchandise
The game train rattles along, folks–chapters one and two are both ready for showcasing in this upcoming stream. You can all tune in Sunday, 3:00 PM GMT, at www.livestream.com/chocolatehammer, for a mostly-spoiler-free tour of the levels and content. Chat with devs, ask questions, and secretly hope we run into a humiliating glitch halfway through.
One weird thing about games development, particularly indie games development, is that you’re working for many months on end without having anything physical to show for it. The closest thing you’ve got is your build–but while it’s extremely rewarding to watch that take shape, there’s something about the ethereal nature of your creation that fails to satisfy the monkey brain. Which is why it’s kind of cool to get actual, physical, sniffable merchandise all printed up–a sentiment we’re sure the people who pre-ordered merchandise agree with. (Slightly brightness-adjusted) pictures below:
This picture came together very naturally–we can’t afford a model, and Arvind can’t afford any other shirts.
These buttons are stylish, but pressing them does nothing but make you look like a stylish person pressing a button.
Classy art like this improves any environment. Arvind hasn’t even noticed that vengeful ghost ever since he hung his up.
You can put these stickers on anything…or anyone.
So to return to my previous thesis statement: this stuff’s pretty damn cool. If you didn’t already buy this stuff during the Kickstarter’s run (if you did, don’t worry–we’ll get it to you), and you’re not going to be at EGXRezzed, you can still order it off our online store. Note that if you order a t-shirt, we’re going to contact you once the order is placed to get your sizing information, since there’s no good way to do that automatically with our current pipeline.
Second disclaimer: these orders are handled manually by people who are spending the rest of their time actually making the game. Generally speaking, you can expect anything you order to be shipped within ten days, whereupon it’s at the mercy of the folktale gremlins employed by the respective international delivery services.
On a final note, Arvind was interviewed by IGN in a feature on Indian game developers. There’s some stuff about our game in there, but most of it’s about how Arvind got his start as a game dev and what our process is like. If you like this sort of thing, we might host a similar Q&A session addressing backer-submitted questions about the game’s development.
That’s all for now. See everyone at the stream!
Chapters are Complete, Conspiracies Abound
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
Script 1/5/14
Come in and check out our build!
This has been an experiment in minimalist marketing. To give feedback, please paint a color or simple glyph expressing your mood and a team member will get back to you within four to eight weeks with a relevant interpretive dance.
Best Wishes from the Developers
Sometimes, in this fast-paced hard-living dog-eat-other-dog-eating-a-dog world of cyberpunk decadence, it’s all too easy to lose track of what’s really important. Of what really matters. You may have heard people say we’ve lost the true meaning of Christmas, and I put it to you, dear reader, that this is absolutely true. Particularly if you, like the majority of people who do and have ever lived, don’t actually celebrate Christmas. Just think: millions of people lost the true meaning of Christmas before it was even invented.
The feeling that we had collectively lost the reason for the season was overpowering. Spurred by America’s greatest and most treasured theological scholars–daytime news hosts and forty-year old puppet features–I set out on a quest to discover the essence of the holidays. And I didn’t go into any department stores or shopping malls, oh no. I found my answer in the simple counsel of friends and loved ones.
“Arvind,” I asked after our Sunday-morning team meeting, “What does Christmas mean to you?”
He thought about it. “My cousin had a Christian teacher who celebrated that. Every December he used to make these wine cakes.”
“Were they any good?”
“I’ll say. It was pretty much the best way to get drunk when you were 15.”
“So…”
“Best holiday ever, yeah.” He thought about it. “But I guess only if you’re 15.”
So there you have it. Film a puppet special about that, networks.
And now, the team updates:
It looks like we’re going to have a pretty solid demo prepared for this upcoming year’s Eurogamer Rezzed. Content creation is going at a pretty respectable clip, and many of the assets we’ll need for the actual art and level parts of the game are already finished. In-engine, we’re at the point where we’re tweaking things like how text appears over NPC heads and how the map should work. Right now the focus is on completing the dialogue scripts, fleshing out the story, and getting the rest of our art assets completed.
On that last note, we’ve added an animator named Mohd Jafar to our team to help us get the sprites looking good–both because he specializes in character animations and because it lets Mikk, our main artist, lavish more detail on them.
Our next game stream is scheduled for January 5th, 2014, at 3PM GMT. We hope to see all of you there!
-Ruts
(Oh–and if you’re celebrating Christmas or anything else, have a good one.)
Streaming Now!
If you’re lucky enough to be reading this around 3PM GMT on December 8th, 2013, you can check out our live developer stream! Therefore, you probably should.
NGDC, REZ, Stream, and Storytime with Arvind! (Mostly that last one)
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!