Unto The End News

We're delighted to say the new trailer we've been working on is wrapped and ready for viewing! Please go ahead, hit the play button and give it a watch:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Really hope you like it. We think it gives a good impression of the kind of challenges you'll face when playing as the father as he tries to get back to his family, who you can see sitting around the fire with him at the start of the trailer.

And we've got other exciting news – Unto The End is going to be on the showfloor at EGX in London this week (17-20 Oct), and we'll be there for the duration. So if you're going to EGX, stop by the booth – we're at RZ9 – give the demo a try. We'd love to see you. It will be the first time Unto has been publicly playable anywhere, so you'll be among the first people to ever play it!

As always, if you like the look of Unto The End, feel free to add it to your Wishlist – it helps immensely come launch day and we appreciate the support.

- Stephen and Sara

https://store.steampowered.com/app/600080/Unto_The_End/

Hey everyone. We're currently putting the finishing touches to a new trailer that we're working on. We're happy with how it's coming together and it should be finished very soon. In the meantime, we wanted to share with you a couple of the scenes that will feature – the father traversing through caverns on some particularly precarious ground, and an encounter with two woad in a winter forest:





If you like the look of Unto The End, please do add it to your Wishlist – it really helps and we appreciate the support.

- Stephen and Sara

https://store.steampowered.com/app/600080/Unto_The_End/

Here's a vista vignette we wanted to share. As the sun rises on the horizon, the father enjoys a moment of respite as he surveys the journey ahead of him.

- Stephen and Sara

https://store.steampowered.com/app/600080/Unto_The_End/

Because we want Unto The End to be a richly skill-focused experience, it won’t feature systems such as levelling-up or XP. We want players to improve by mastering the moves that will be at their disposal from the outset of the journey. In addition to combat mastery, players will also need to be adept at observing what's happening on-screen. For example, we have no fixed HUD, and that means no health bar/meter, so players will need to be aware of the father's condition by reading his appearance.

With that in mind, it’s vital we make the father’s condition easy to read and interpret, so players can tell if he’s in perfect shape, or on the verge of dropping dead. At present, these are how the father’s four main states are shown:

Normal/Healthy
Nothing to worry about here. A nice and springy idle animation shows the father is at full health.

Injured
As well as a more stooping stance, you can see the father's breathing is laboured. In-game, the laboured breathing would be further emphasised by visible breath, and blood on his garb would be visible.

This is how it looks in-game:


Bleeding
The father dropping to one knee indicates a more serious state than being simply injured, and the player needs to use either a herb or salve to improve the father's condition. If no herb or salve is administered within a certain time, the father will die, which is the fourth state.



Dead
When you see this animation, it's too late. Time to restart from the last checkpoint and go again.



Thanks for checking out this post – we'll have more to share with you soon. If you haven't already, please use the widget below and add Unto to your Wishlist. We really appreciate your support!

- Stephen and Sara

https://store.steampowered.com/app/600080/Unto_The_End/

Here's a look at an attack animation of one of Unto's woad enemies. This particular woad is armed with a quarterstaff and in the time-lapse below we're animating a two-handed overhead attack for it:



Obviously the process has been massively speeded up, but in real-time what you see in that clip is about an hour of work.

Here's the final attack animation running at about 25% normal speed, just to better show the individual frames it's composed of:



And here it is running at normal speed i.e. how it appears in the game:



As an example of how woad attack animations look in action, here's a scenario from the game where the father finds himself going up against two of them.



You can see the quarterstaff woad isn't actually involved in this particular skirmish – we want enemies in Unto to feel unique/individual, even if they are the same type of creature. So different woad wear different garb or have different markings, and wield different weapons.

It means more work – the three different woad here all need animations that are unique to them, for example – but this 'handcrafted' approach is really fundamental to the final experience we want to create for players.

- Stephen and Sara

https://store.steampowered.com/app/600080