When Joe Houston, formerly a core member of the Dishonored team, headed to Kickstarter to raise funds for an esoteric turn-based strategy game, I was intrigued. One interview later, I was convinced that Unwritten might well be one of the highlights of 2013. The crowdfunding attempt almost failed but we were glad to see it reach the $75,000 goal with little time to spare. The initially planned August release date passed and now, sadly, the game has been delayed indefinitely. The reasons are below.
It looked so doomed. Despite the obvious coo-look-at-this potential of Unwritten, its Kickstarter was struggling. Asking for just $75,000, the game of directing a nomadic people toward their god across procedurally generated landscapes really didn’t seem like it would make it. It did! From Joe Houston, a gameplay programmer on Dishonored (who wrote us this excellent piece on gaming violence), the independent project aims to be on a Civilisation scale, but with an emphasis on the nature of storytelling. You can read Adam’s interview with Houston here, which goes into much more detail. I’ve reposted the video below, so you can see what you forgot to fund.
You may know that Joe Houston worked on Dishonored, or you may remember his considered and compelling words on violence in games, but not enough people seem to know about Unwritten: That Which Happened, the game in development at Joe’s new independent studio, Roxlou Games. Unwritten is one of the most intriguing in the crop of turn-based titles moving through the crowd-funding space, with a focus that lies as much on narrative as combat and tactics. It’ll need a strong final week to reach its $75,000 goal. I spoke to Joe to find out more about the game, going indie and storytelling.
Just before Christmas, Nathan wrote a piece asking for a conversation about the role gaming violence plays in our lives. And as so many have when discussing the topic, he featured an image from Dishonored at the top – a man getting stabbed through the neck. For Joe Houston, the former Arkane developer who created that stabbing scene, this was the prompt he needed to give his own perspective on the subject.
Whenever I’m clicking my way through game industry opinion articles, I tend to get hung up on pieces about video game violence. This is mostly because the image plastered across the top of the post is a screen grab from Dishonored. You know, the one where a member of the city watch gets his jugular opened in a first-person blast of arterial spray. But it’s not the shock of that image that stops me. No, I pause because I’m the guy that wrote the code to make the player do that in the first place.
