Project: Unshining

Hi! We're the team behind Project: Unshining, a restoration project working on rebuilding and rerelasing the short-lived GameFuna MMO "Darkness Descends." (Note: This account is not affiliated with Daniel Mullins nor official in any capacity)

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Project: Unshining Introduction

What is Project: Unshining?

Project: Unshining is a restoration project being worked on by a small team of developers looking to restore the taken-down MMO "Darkness Descends" by GameFuna in the late 2000s. The game was only up for a few weeks before being taken down without notice or comment, to the dismay of the small but passionate following the game had created. Recently, one of the members of the development team managed to gain access to a large portion of the game's files in a manner that we thought we could recreate the game on our own, so we did!

What was Darkness Descends?

Darkness Descends was a survival-fantasy MMO where players would work in teams in order to gather resources, fight monsters, and progressively move through the long story the game had in place. Unfortunately, due to the structure of the game, players were unable to progress to the ending of the story in time before the servers were shut down, leading to widespread discussion of what the ending areas of this game could have entailed. Thankfully, our team has managed to get ahold of these areas mostly intact, and while some of us are waiting ourselves to keep the mystery preserved, we're all excited to show it off when we finally finish development!

Who is working on Project: Unshining?

Currently our team is only 4 people, most of which working on updating and implementing the old code to function in a more permanent and modern way. If you're asking questions here, though, my name is Ivy (they/she), lead developer on the project, and I'm more than willing to answer any questions you guys might have about Project: Unshining (Outside of "How long until it comes out", that answer will always always always be: "When we're ready", we're a small team after all!)

How frequently will progress updates happen?

Progress is moving smoothly now, but is highly subject to change in pace given a variety of personal factors. We will give updates as we have them, and otherwise we ask everyone to be patient. We're all really excited to get this game back in everyone's hands, just give us the time to put the polish into it that will make it the best it can be!

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Update #3: Progress and Crafting

Hey everyone, it's been a busy few days for us, and we wanted to generally share how things have been coming along our end, and talk a little more about crafting and upgrades!

First, the drop and loot tables have been almost entirely finalized. Given how important collecting resources is to the overall game, this core being completed was a major goal. Some rare items may needed to be added in yet, but the basis for each and how they contribute to major crafting recipes is largely finished.

As Mike mentioned, NPCs are a larger overall struggle, but we've managed to get some of the key ones replaced, though with a lot more limited dialogue than their original counterparts

Classes and combat have been coming along nicely, we've finished implementing the one non-spoiler class that wasn't able to be fully obtained due to time constraints during the original period, but we have made so much more fun and exciting to be able to get!

According to Mike, a lot of the more spoilery stuff is pretty half finished and buggy, but he's doing the best he can to get it patched up. Given how much further we are on the main game in comparison, odds are we might be working on those later parts while the main game is up and running initially

For our larger section on this update, I wanted to touch generally on crafting, and more specifically, on camp upgrades. One major complaint that people had with DD is that there was never any reason to be in your camp, as there wasn't anything to do. So now, we're adding in some camp upgrades that your guild will be able to all contribute towards for a larger benefit and more activities! This includes a feature where players are rewarded for visiting other guilds, and for interacting with visitors from other places, to hopefully encourage larger community outside of the smaller groups people tend to stick in!

Additionally, we're trying our hardest to come up with more varied and unique crafting recipes in general, and while we'll have suggestions open upon release, we'd love to hear from you guys too! If you have any suggestions, either for camp upgrades, or just any item you could craft, send us a message or an ask! Any suggestions are welcome!!

Thank you guys so much for the support, we're looking forward to getting this available to you guys as soon as possible!

-Ivy

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Unrelated to the Proooject per-se, but hey additional project ppl can we get your pronouns?

Also, tell us your favourite classes too if you want!

Yeah of course! I already mentioned mine (They/She) but I can grab everyone else's and their favorite classes!

Korasi- She/Her (Favorite class: Rogue)

Luca - They/Them (Favorite class: Paladin)

Mike - He/Him (Favorite Class: It's a secret)

And my favorite class is Mage! This is the team for now, it'll mainly be me talking, but if we get someone new we'll make an announcement for it!

-Ivy

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guess its because it was around for literally a week but ive NEVER heard of this game what was it about? like the story and stuff, was it some medieval-fantasy type game from what im hearing??

I'm diverting my knowledge on this one, she'll know way more on the topic then I do

-Ivy

HI!!!!! OK SO-

Darkness Descends was a pretty standard fantasy MMO, think like World of Warcraft or Runescape, standard fantasy setting, equal interactions both between other players and with NPCs, it didn't have anything really with different races like those two games, it stuck with just humans for the people in the world, but it made up for it just because of Gamefuna's general impressive skill at making and writing believable characters, so it's not noticeable too much!! But otherwise general fantasy yeah, standard kinda JRPG fantasy monsters, paladins, a fairly standard but strong magic system, kings and princesses all that stuff!

In terms of a basic story structure it was pretty simple, there was an evil corrupting force spreading throughout the kingdom that simply just called the Darkness (real creative, I know -_-), and the goal was to try to find the source and stop it! By the nature of the game, though it was really grindy, it took a lot of time and effort to make story progress, and sometimes things were even locked behind time limits, where you had to wait in real time for NO reason which is always a game killer, even for how dead the game kinda was on arrival anyways. As a result of that, I'm forcing Mike to remove those so people can actually progress!

Before it shut down the furthest players were finishing up getting the macguffins you need to be able to leave the starting (well, I guess the ONLY island that we got), but no one knew what would happen when we left. UNTIL TODAY.... But not me I'm stayin as spoiler free as possible :P

Hope that answers enough of the questions! I don't wanna give away too too much because it'll spoil it for people who haven't played before, ESPECIALLY the characters so! That's the general overview!

-Korasi

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Update #2: Class Progress and NPCs

Hey everyone, this is hyperNovA, or Mike if it's easier. Ivy asked me to write up a general status update on what I specifically have been working on.

As the main programmer on the project, and the one entrusted with knowing and working with the unreleased content, I've been working as hard as I can to be able to get this thing back in a playable state.

The starter classes are fully implemented, with their buffs working as intended, as well as the ability to shift between classes at will. Secondary level classes are being worked on intently, with their buffs being slightly more difficult into the game, or just annoying which means I've been putting it off.

The big thing I wanted to mention well before release was progress on the interactive NPCs in the game. If you, like me, know about the state of the games industry, or have been a longtime fan of Gamefuna games, you'll know that the way in which GF programs their characters is an industry secret guarded under the deepest lock and key. And trust me, it's not like I haven't tried. I've even had some of my coworkers look into it with me and nothing, it's what makes their games unique, but the security and secrecy behind the method is almost more impressive than the method itself.

Given that fact, I have been told to deliver the disappointing news that we are not going to be able to provide the same level of character interactivity as most Gamefuna games are, despite that being such a key factor. In what we have been able to recover from the code, most of the data on the characters was either only partially intact or removed completely, and the parts that were left were under that Gamefuna security we can't crack. We're doing our absolute hardest to replicate the feeling to the best of our ability, but even with my knowledge, we won't be able to replicate that. However between Luca and Ivy, they'll be able to provide a similar enough experience. Sorry again everyone.

-Mike

One more thing I wanted to remind everyone, asks are open if people have any questions about how progress is going or aspects of the game! Happy to answer any (non-spoiler) questions!

-Ivy

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Update #1: Progress So Far

Figures it'd be a good idea to actually go over what we've managed to get done so far. Even with the code and assets we've found, there's a lot that we need to build from the ground up.

Foraging works exactly as it used to in the game, as well as player creation, inventory management, and interactions between players, their items and each other. Given this was the core of the original game, we needed to make sure it functioned just like we remembered it.

Combat has been sufficiently added, with monster variety and experience functioning as intended. Combat was never the biggest part of the game, but it did matter in order to work towards the more important next big function:

Classes! The starter classes have been fully implemented, though their level up benefits are still being tuned (Rogue was WAY too broken and we intend to fix that). We've managed to add some of the later classes, but after the ones we saw, we had no info on what came after, so we're being forced to make up our own, which may take quite a bit longer

The first few starting areas are mostly done, we've been testing to make sure the RNG for items is balanced, as well as for events. We want to keep the same main item pools as Darkness Descends originally had, but also add some extra things for more variety and opportunity for crafting

These are the major things we've been able to implement so far, but plenty more has been done, including figuring out some old NPC code, so look forward to a future update on that! We hope you're all looking forward to it!

-Ivy