Remember the Kickstarter campaign by Playdek for a JRPG titled Unsung Story: Tale of the Guardians, featuring writing by Yasumi Matsuno, art by Akihiko Yoshida and music by Hitoshi Sakamoto? Looks like development has encountered more problems, and we'll have to wait longer for a release, that was initially slated for July 2015.
Playdek, which is developing the game, posted an update on its Kickstarter page, reporting the loss of staff members, which impacted development, promising to "refine the release timeline" as soon as possible.
"Dear Unsung Backers,
There has been another delay in reporting to you since our last development update, and we apologize for that. Our continued intention is to make a great game, and get Unsung Story to development completion and released to you and the gaming public. During the last few months we have had some development setbacks that are affecting our timeline and progress on the game, while also affecting what we need to do in the immediate future as a company.
After we posted our latest development progress, we unfortunately lost a few key staff members that were part of Unsung Story development, and that has had an impact on any progress since then, as well as our product focus. We now have one internal team capable of working on a single project, and for the financial strength of the company we need to focus on a few products in the near term that have the ability to get to a retail release before Unsung Story is able to. While this is a difficult choice to make, it is one we need to do for the ongoing financial health of the company. For Unsung Story, we will explore options for outside development help, and will look to see if we are able to bring on an outside team that can assist us in furthering development. While we aren’t assured this will come to fruition, we do want to make sure that we are exploring any options at hand that can make progress on the game.
While the development goals that were spelled out in the previous update remain intact for now, the release window of those goals is affected, and at this time we do not have an update as to what the new release window for development rollout will be. This will be affected by the ability and timing of any outside support, as well as when the single internal team is able to get back onto Unsung development, and when we do know, we will update you all. As we pursue this direction, we will refine the release timeline as soon as we are able to. With the loss of that staff, and without having any new progress to share since the last update, we felt we needed to sort through what options and directions we had available before we updated you on the current status, but again do apologize for the lack of recent updates. We will get back to you as soon as we can with any progress and status update. Thanks."Having backed the game back when it was launched, it's sad to see that it's being plagued by this many problems. The core staff working on it is definitely top notch, but looks like they aren't properly supported by Playdek on the programming side. Hopefully, we'll get to play the game sooner or later, considering that the concept was really interesting.