Roxlou Games

A running joke on Unwritten Passage is that everything that can go wrong will, but we console ourselves that at least everything that can go right will also happen. Although some of us have been making games for years, there has been a learning curve involved in making a game as part of a successful Kickstarter. On the one hand this gives great freedom. On the other, it requires tremendous foresight, and you find yourself locked in to inevitable over-commitments made in early planning due to promises made to backers. This of course has been a challenge, but it has also been one of Unwritten Passage‘s greatest strengths, because it has forced us to continually make creative compromises while keeping our eyes firmly fixed on goals that don’t move. We have been fortunate that in every case, these compromises have made the game cooler and more interesting to work on.

Even our shadow puppet style was born out of compromise

Case in point: rival clan leaders. Back in February we did a lot of exploration on how “story bouts” were going to play and look. These mini encounters represent your clan and a rival tribe swapping stories in order to share your histories and to potentially make an alliance. Although the concepts were promising, we had major concerns about communicating feedback to the player about how the “bout” was going. We mocked up some rough stuff using the shadow puppets from our “story events”, but although we could certainly convey someone shaking a stick in the air, it was difficult to describe an emotion that way. Was he shaking a stick out of anger? Excitement? Because his arm fell asleep? The player just wasn’t getting good feedback about how their choices were being interpreted by the game.

Rough concept for story bouts

Meanwhile, we had another problem on the back-burner. One of our backer rewards for Kickstarter was the opportunity for them to get their face in the game as one of our shadow puppets. This seemed a natural addition since we needed as much variety as we could get. However, it was important to us that this not be something that seemed weird or out of place. We wanted to use the backer’s face in the actual game (not just as a vanity addition for the person that made the pledge), but putting human faces on our puppets wasn’t working out. As we progressed it turned out that keeping the story event puppets abstract-looking had the best visual impact, and our attempts to put our own tiny faces on the puppets ended up looking silly.

This last month an epiphany produced the solution to both our backer issue and the story bout problem. We decided that our rival clan leaders should have their own unique look, and that they should be focused on conveying emotion to the player. This meant that they would be a single giant face (with a tiny dangling body). This also meant that our backers’ faces were going to be the tribal leaders, and that we now had this great big space to exaggerate features and make things gel with the world as a whole.

First the caricature…

Then add the fantasy!

Interestingly, another compromise here led to some interesting visual dynamics. We first approached the leader faces completely in silhouette (like the puppets in our story events), but we struggled with recreating likeness, conveying emotion, and rigging and animating a face with the necessary moving parts to work as a shadow puppet. We had to articulate huge sections of the face to make sure light would “shine through” in the right spots, and things were getting out of hand. However, once again the history of Balinese shadow theater came to our rescue with some needed inspiration. Balinese shadow puppets, despite being seen in silhouette, are also hand painted and intricately tooled, meaning they tell a different story when on the shadow stage and when viewed in “real life”.

An “off stage” Balinese shadow puppet

That gave us the idea that we’re currently going with: allow the clan leaders to be hand painted, paper puppets, but allow them to nominally function as shadow puppets for dramatic effect.

A dramatically different effect.

Unwritten Passage is full of anecdotes like this, and retelling them helps remind us about what is so great to be doing something like this. As always we are hugely grateful to the support of our families and crowdfunding backers. And remember that you can continue to support the development of our weird game.

Roxlou Games

Those that are following our progress will notice that we’re settling into a monthly update schedule. This is no coincidence since this is roughly how we look at the project as well. A month is usually how long we bring in a new contributor for, and our work goals end up falling into a similar rhythm. These mini milestones are also when we look back and figure out if we had a successful month. Usually the answer is “yes” with a “but”. However, today we can unequivocally say that April kicked ass.

Big strides were made in programming and art direction, and a major part of that success was our collaboration with art director Kim Passey.

Kim’s a fantastic artist in his own right, but for Unwritten Passage his more than 20 years of experience really helped us bring cohesion and focus to the killer ideas that Lee (our principle artist) brought to the table. Kim’s influence was also instrumental in exploring the themes we already had. For example, in one case he was able to take our original environment concept piece from the Kickstarter (supplied by Waking Mars artist Amanda Williams) and illustrate with a rough color shift how we could make a barren environment still seem alive.

Before:

After:

Tools and technology continue to progress, with much of our foundation work coming to a close. Thanks in large part to the smooth progress of the art direction, Joe was also able to make early strides in other areas, including a cloth simulation for the ribbons and banners we see playing a big role in the look of the game.

Moving forward the team’s big focus is on our “vertical slice” and a proper gameplay trailer to coincide with a Steam Greenlight campaign. As long as we keep having months like April, this will be happening toward the end of June and will put us well on the way to our first beta.

As always we’re strengthened by the continued support of family, friends, and our many crowdfunding backers. Independent game development is not always easy, but it’s a tremendous privilege that we’re all intensely grateful for.

More to follow!

Roxlou Games

The end of March closes out the first month of production on Unwritten Passage, the weird procedural strategy game made possible by our many crowd-funding supporters. It’s an exciting time, but also one of hard work. It was mainly a month of framework building, where we put down a foundation that will allow us to make rapid progress later on in the project. However, there were some points of rewarding exploration too, like when we started designing the third playable “story teller” (previously called “clan leaders”). She isn’t ready to be shown just yet, but we’re excited about how this character (one that leverages wind, kites, and the ability to change the very fabric of a story itself) will expand and diversify our roster of story tellers.

But probably the most rewarding moment of the month came when we were able to hold the printed posters and screen prints in our hands and get them packaged up for our Kickstarter backers.

We did all our printing locally, so Austin’s massive SXSW festival delayed getting our prints until the very end of the month. However, we feel the wait was worth it. The prints turned out stellar across the board, and as we were getting everything signed, tubed, and ready to ship, we were extremely proud.

Although working on Unwritten Passage is rewarding in and of itself, this is the first time on this project that we get to see the cycle of creation through to the end. We had a concept, we iterated to create print designs, we made commitments to our backers, and we are now delivering them as a product. It’s a special feeling, and even though some of us have been doing this kind of thing for years, that feeling doesn’t really wear off.

For those that are getting a physical reward like a poster or screen print, we’ll be dropping those in the mail in the coming week after the Easter rush. “Digital Poster” downloads will be going out by email before the weekend is out, and everyone that got a physical poster will also be getting a digital copy of the poster art. Note that as the screen prints are a limited run there will be no digital file for those.

If you had a digital poster (either as an add-on or as part of your printed reward) be sure to contact us if you haven’t gotten your email by Monday, April 1st. “April Fools Day” jokes are punishable by death.

A huge thanks to all our backers and to our families for their continued support. More to follow!

Roxlou Games

P.S. Missed out on the Kickstarter? You can still get copies of the “digital posters” by becoming a backer through our website.

Hey All,

We’re coming to the end of our first week of full production, and it feels great! We’ll keep you updated as we get stuff that’s worth showing, but in the meantime we have a few bits of project news and business.

Reward Surveys

If you’re a backer be sure to respond to the survey Kickstarter sent to you. We’ve gotten many responses, but there are also hundreds left untouched. The quicker we get all your information, the quicker you can get your rewards!

That Which is now “Unwritten Passage”

So the game is now called Unwritten Passage: That Which Happened.

A big thanks to all our backers and new friends that helped make a stressful situation (the renaming of the game due to a trademark conflict) into a fun affair. Voting and discussion was lively, and we feel the new title is a good compromise. And special thanks goes to wonderboy2402 (as he or possibly she is known on our website) for first suggesting the title that eventually won.

Poster/Screen Print Progress

Once the naming issue was finally sorted, we were finally free to update the poster designs with the new title and get started on printing.

Printers now have the files and we’re expecting to get prints back within the next two weeks, at which point we’ll be signing, shipping, and most likely drinking. Stay tuned for pictures then, but in the meantime… shipping tubes!

Roxlou Games

UPDATE: The poll is now closed. We’re ending a little early since traffic has slowed to a trickle and Unwritten Passage has a commanding lead. Thanks for voting!

Following the success of our Kickstarter campaign, we’ve enjoyed a bit of added exposure. One unexpected side effect of this is that this has also drawn the attention of the “Eye of Sauron”, i.e. the scrutiny of large companies and their faithful legal staff. DC Comics has contacted us and is claiming a common law trademark conflict with our game Unwritten: That Which Happened, and their comic series The Unwritten.

For our part we’d never heard of this comic series before, and our trademark research on “Unwritten” didn’t turn it up originally, although this may have been because we were focused specifically on video games. While a name conflict here still wouldn’t necessarily be a legal issue, DC is claiming that our game uses a “similar art style” and “similar story-telling method”, which would cause consumers to mistakenly believe that our game is actually based on their comic. We leave it to our backers and readers to decide the merit of such a claim for themselves.

This should get you started.

That all said, it looks like we need to change the name of the game slightly to keep everyone happy (especially those of us that have whole legal teams on retainer). We’ve narrowed it down to a few choices, but we need your help to make the final call. Vote in the poll below and help us choose the new name for Unwritten!

After the end of our successful Kickstarter for Unwritten: That Which Happened, we’ve received numerous requests from people that missed the campaign but still wanted to back the project. We’ve responded to this overwhelming feedback and have put up a “Support the Project” page that allows people to continue backing Unwritten.

Not only is this a chance to get in on many of the backer rewards and “add-ons”, but this is also your opportunity to get access to backers-only email updates and the backers-only forums. We rely on our backers for feedback in developing the game, so come be a part of our process!

Check it out!

In case you haven’t heard, our Kickstarter campaign is over and Unwritten: That Which Happened hit its funding goal!

But most likely you’ve heard us cheering about it non-stop for hours. So why not hear Rock, Paper, Shotgun weigh in instead?

You Couldn’t Write It: Unwritten Kickstarter Succeeds

Thanks everybody for their support! Expect to hear more as development ramps up in earnest.

WE HIT OUR FUNDING GOAL!

But the campaign isn’t over yet! Click here to hear about how you can contribute for the next 5 hours.