Unyha - Current State and High Level Progress

Current Status

We, Viktor & Benjamin, are still developing Unyha as a 2-man crew and have been pouring hours into this game every day for the past decade or so. While this project has had its priorities in different domains over the years, the vision has always remained the same: a game world where you and your actions become stories that persist and continuously influence other players in gameplay.

We've been a little bit quiet for some time now, as we've taken a step back to reflect on how we can make this vision come true with such a small team. We've put our heads down and crunched out both technical and conceptual strategies that are not only practical and feasible for us, but also creative and groundbreaking from the gameplay perspective.

We've made significant progress in gameplay, primarily in combat, UI, quality of life features particularly related to crafting, and are still working hard on putting the fundamental pieces of Autochronicle together and surface it as part of gameplay. We consider Unyha still to be very early in the process of becoming a fully fledged game, but are confident that there is currently at least 10-20 hours of quality gameplay per season.

With this foundation and the current state of Unyha, we are very eager to get players back into the game and start co-developing with our community again. We are building this for you and really need your feedback to make sure we are on track with building the right things.

One of these things is a concept we call Story Worlds. Simply put, a story world is the database in which the stories that you generate through play will be saved and referenced by any players connected to it. Below is an explanation of Story Worlds and how we intend them to work. In playtesting, we will only have 1 Story World and 1 server to start, but if you are curious about how we will scale up later, you might find it interesting.

Story Worlds

Unlike MMORPGs where a single "server" is tied to one database, Unyha allows multiple servers to connect to a shared Storyworld. This means even if you’re playing on a different server, your actions—and the actions of others—can ripple across the world. Think of it like multiple DnD groups playing the same campaign, sharing updates between sessions. Another word commonly used in this context is "instances" where you can think of it as in for example World of Warcraft Dungeons. Many groups of players can be in the same Dungeon at the same time, in different instances of that dungeon.

For example, you choose the Storyworld "Middle-Earth" where you create your House and a new character for the current Season. You play a couple of seasons with your friends, meaning you see and interact with them in real time, in-game (you will be paired together on the same Server A). You also get updates from what players on Server B is doing. You can learn about players in the Storyworld and you can even meet with them in different sessions if you are paired up on the same Server in a session.

Here’s how Storyworlds function at a high level:

This is how it works, but it won't be anything players will actively have to think about. The only important thing to keep in mind is that if you want to play with your friends or share stories with certain players, you need to belong to the same Storyworld.

Keep your eyes peeled, testing starts soon.