The Shift To URP & Peace Island’s First Public Demo!

Sorry we did not update yesterday - Portland had temperatures in the 90’s, and our computers shut down due to overheating.

Those of you who were reading updates earlier this year might remember our aborted attempt to convert the project to URP (Universal Render Pipeline.)  That attempt was foiled due to bad scheduling - the time required conflicted with our playtest release timeline.  The problem with the process is that it is downright exhausting - it requires converting or replacing just about every material, texture, shader, and visual system in the game.

However, after writing last week’s update, I realized it was time for me to isolate and remove the last traces of any recurring error in the Unity Engine console.  After all - these were the errors that were causing problems with conversion to Mac.

I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it a thousand times: The PC is a VERY easy platform to dev for, because no matter how much crap code you throw at it, the PC will just shrug, and do the best it can with whatever it gets.

The Mac OS, however, has no time for that.  This again came to the fore, during our ongoing efforts to release a playtest version for that platform. Working backwards, I spent a full day eliminating these issues one-by-one on the PC side - but it soon became apparent that the time was nigh for that long-overdue conversion to URP.

So, over the past 72 hours, I’ve been working on bringing the project over to this new pipeline.  I’d say that I’m about 66% complete - you can see there are only a few remaining bits of magenta in the game world.  I believe we’ll handle the last major systems issues by noon tomorrow.

The problem with this is that we can’t show off much in the terms of screenshots, because (as you can see) the process is half-finished.

One of the things that has hampered the Peace Island project, is that for most of the time that the game has been in development, the world has been in the midst of the greatest pandemic seen in modern times.  All public gatherings - much less game conventions - were pretty much illegal, objectively immoral, or highly restricted for two years.  

As a result, we were not able to promote the game in the manner that most indie projects have enjoyed for the previous two decades.  To a certain extent, Laura & I were absolutely fine with this - every photo or video of a gaming convention that we have seen looks like a dimly-lit sensory overload where we’d have to scream into someone's ear to make ourselves understood.

Personally, I’d like to have the release event for Peace Island take place in the community center on Cliff Island (above.)  It occupies the floor over the island’s post office & historical society and has a maximum seating of about 100 people.   I confess that I get a bit of schadenfreude at the idea of the gaming press having to haul themselves to the edge of the nation’s continental waters to cover the event.

But until that day:  We’ve secured the location for the first public demo of Peace Island!

Portland, Maine recently got its first cat cafe - MeowCatLounge!

Laura & I agreed that this was THE place to host this event.  It might not be several miles off the coast, but it’s a space perfectly suited to the nature of the event.  The date is yet to be decided, but it will be in mid-to-late August - concurrent with the Closed Beta release.

We’ll have more details, when we next update on the 26th - sooner if we have the Mac Playtest version up & running!