Dear Players,
my name is Rafal and I am Project Manager in Ultimate Games S.A. (Publisher Team).

Today we released long-awaited Unlucky Seven in Early Access. You probably have a lot of questions and the main one is "Why in Early Access?".

Few days before release, we talk internally about gameplay and players expectations. The game was abandoned by the developer, and then another one began to develop it - and as you know, it is difficult to continue someone's work.

We decided to take more feedback from players, to know what you expect from the game and how many of your request/ideas can be implemented in the game. We try to provide players game what they expect, but to do this we need to know your opinions and feelings from it. That is why we decided to release the game in Early Access and provide it with further support.

Besides this main problem, we also need to proofread all ENGLISH translations. We don't speak native English so it's hard for us to verify it by ourselves. If anyone will find that something is incomprehensible or does not make sense - we ask for reporting it. We will do our best to fix it.

Game is fully playable at its state and can be completed but please remember that after EA it may be different from how it looks now.

If you will find any problems, blockers or any kind of bugs - please, post needed information on the forum and don't give us a negative review :( We will do our best to polish this game as much as possible.

Kind Regards,
Rafal - Project Manager in Ultimate Games S.A.

Hello everyone,
I would like to inform that the release date was pushed to 30 August.

We decided to give us a bit more time to polish the final version of the game and add final dubbing.


Kind Regards,
Rafał - Project Manager in Ultimate Games S.A.

Dear Fans of furries,
we are happy to finally announce the release date of Unlucky Seven.

The game will have its worldwide premiere on:

Kind Regards,
Rafał - Project Manager in Ultimate Games S.A.

Dear Players,
we just sent the steam keys to the beta version of Unlucky Seven.

Please check your inbox and SPAM folders!

Messages from mailing systems very often are marked as "spam". Be sure to check it twice.

We created a few subforums if you will encounter any problems or will want to share your opinion - just do it :)

We will be grateful for every opinion - no matter if it is positive or negative. Every single voice counts for us.

Kind Regards,
Rafał - Project Manager in Ultimate Games S.A.

Hello everyone,
beta signups ended over 2 weeks ago and you are probably curious what's next :)

Without prolonging, let's get to the details!

We plan to start beta tests on Monday, 25/02/2019. It will run on steam.

We decided that everyone who signed up via the form will take part in the tests.

Monday, 25/02/2019 about 15:00 CEST

Now let's take a look at the game :)

Kind Regards,
Rafał - Project Manager

Dear Users,
in the beginning, I would like to wish everyone (earlier) - Happy New Year!

Today I have some information for you.

I am happy to inform you that the development team is alive and working hard to finish the game. The whole team is focused on creating a good game, which was in a way the reason for the long production cycle.

The game is already at the final stage of production, so we will be able to spend more time communicating with players and informing everyone on a regular basis about how the work is going to finish the game.

During the year, many times we said that the game will be released at the end of 2018 - however, we were not able to complete all aspects of the game on time - for which we sincerely apologize.

The final release date of the game was set to mid/end Q1 of 2019.

As a publisher - Ultimate Game S.A. wants to provide the best product that will be warmly welcomed by players around the world. Drawing conclusions from our previous premier (ex. Professional Fishing), we decided to change the publishing strategy and focus primarily on the quality and refinement of production to avoid critical errors on the day of the game's release.

Therefore, we decided to move the premiere of the game to Q1 2019.

We would like to invite everyone to take part in the Unlucky Seven beta test. Thanks to your help, we will be able to fix bugs, remove technical problems and just make the game better!

It is an opportunity for you to finally play your favorite furry and try our game.

Sign-up are open till: 31/01/2019

http://ultimate-games.com/U7_beta.html

Kind Regards,
Rafał - Project Manager in Ultimate Games S.A.

We have uploaded a new teaser (and new screenshots). Feel free to love it! ;)

Today Yod (our screenwriter) will talk about our inspirations which influenced the final shape of the project.

Originally posted by Yod:

One of you (greetings to the Kekistani Preacher) asked what is inspiring us while creating Unlucky. So it happens that it is my turn to write an article.
I decided to divide my inspirations into the three categories and gave them very generalizing names, but the descriptions should brighten them up.

The categories are:

1. Involuntary inspirations.
2. Genre inspirations.
3. Stylistic inspirations.

Involuntary inspirations have the deepest roots - their inclusion is fully automatic. The author has to stain their work with what they are soaked with.
While writing dialogues, I often catch myself on making the characters sound similar to the ones of the Polish TV series The World According to the Kiepski Family, or on creating a scene which looks like it was based on Cow and Chicken from the old Cartoon Network. I watch a lot of football matches, so my favorite club colors will resound throughout the game. More than a half of the script is produced while listening to Ghost's music. Therefore, it is safe to say that the influence of Papa Emeritus and the Nameless Ghouls is more than just a butterfly effect ;).

Involuntary inspiration

Genre inspirations are about the artwork I'm trying to imitate in some way. Games made by TellTale (especially The Wolf Among Us), Life is Strange, Oxenfree, and Firewatch are the ones I use most often as my role-models. How to set a camera? How to make an interactive dialogue engaging? How to stress the consequences of a decision? If you do not know how to do something, there is a high probability that analyzing these games will help. I'm not talking about blindly copying from them. We would not be able to do that even if we wanted to, because we have to make our game work in virtual reality while paying a tribute to slashers, including their form. Those design decisions force us to work out some new solutions where old ones don't work anymore.

Slashers seem to have the most influence on my screenplay and gameplay choices. I immersed myself in the genre, systematically watching movies and reading works devoted to their style, form, and history. By the way, Unlucky Seven will have a reference to every slasher which was created in 1970-2000 (taking various definitions into account). References will also include additional influential productions from the 60s, films from the borderline of the genre, or really slashing ones which can't be classified as slashers. Usually references are very "delicate". They are destined just to add some flavor. Unlucky Seven will not be a pop-culture collage, but a postmodern wink to slasher lovers. Well, maybe a few winks... or allergic conjunctivitis.

Genre inspiration

Stylistic inspirations are the ones that set us apart from other story-driven games and slasher movies. They help us to make the stuff that I wrote
about in the previous paragraph look fresh and original. We're bringing the slasher genre to our own Cyberpunk oriented science-fiction style. Naturally, it is forced by the setting. Interestingly, we are drawing on Nicolas Winding Refn's productions. Just look at Paweł's concept of the motel.

Stylistic inspiration

And here's a bonus concept for the teaser trailer made by myself, just so you know that Paweł and Dawid are not the only artists in our team.

My awesome artwork

Tune in next time.

Originally posted by Reminder:

Add Unlucky Seven to your wishlist! It shows us your support and helps us out quite a bit!
Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook[www.facebook.com] for the latest news!

Today Blaze (our programmer) will let you know how to make your pixelart models and textures look great in Unity game engine.

Originally posted by Blaze:

When you create a 3d pixelart game in Unity (or any other game engine) you will encounter first problems as soon as you place your model with pixelart texture in the scene.

Default settings - filtering and mipmaps are on. There is a nasty blur on our pixelart texture, yuck!

The first thing you want to do is to turn off the mipmaps for all of your textures. This will prevent the engine from blurring your pixelart when the camera gets far away from the object. However, this is not enough to keep your art nice and crispy. It still gets blurred because of texture filtering (bilinear/trilinear/anisotropic). The easiest solution is to simply disable this effect by switching to point / nearest neighbor filtering.

In many cases this is sufficient, but it does have a serious downside - there is a lot of visible and annoying jitter when you scale, rotate and view the textures at very shallow angles. It comes as no surprise as we just disabled everything which enhanced texture quality in such scenarios.

Simple solution - no filtering and no mipmaps. Observe the jitter that appears at distance. In most cases this is acceptable but we decided to go one step further...

So what else can we do to achieve smooth pixel edges without blurring the textures? The solution is to use custom shaders. With some patience and shader-writting skills you can either create your own from ground up or modify an existing solution. We based our shaders on the simple and efficient RetroAA package from unity asset store (you can find it here[www.assetstore.unity3d.com]) - it's a great starting point for any pixelart shader needs.

Best solution - custom shader. Crisp pixelart and no jitter.

Okay, so you have your 3d objects in the scene and the textures display properly. As you continue building your level you might be worried about the difference of pixel scale between objects (for example: placing two instances of a rock next to each other and scaling one up to be two times bigger). You don't have to worry about such cases too much as different scales look perfectly fine next to each other as long as you stick to the rule that the bigger the object is the bigger pixel scale it can have as it places extra emphasis on it's huge size.

Bigger pixels on bigger objects are OK.

Finally, you're adding some lights to the scene expecting the smooth shading to completely ruin the pixelart effect. Surprisingly, both smooth lighting and shadows look perfectly fine. However, it still helps to lower the dynamic shadow resolution as the pixelated/jagged shadow edges work great with pixelart textures while being more efficient to draw than high-res ones.

Look at the floor and observe how low-res shadows and smooth gradients created by the lights look absolutely fine. It's ok to use them as they don't interfere with the pixelart at all.

Tune in next time for an article from our screenwriter!

Originally posted by Reminder:

Add Unlucky Seven to your wishlist! It shows us your support and helps us out quite a bit!
Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook[www.facebook.com] for the latest news!