Happy New Year!
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:
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