Music news, and an anniversary!

While most of the development over the past week has been back-end coding, I've been busily at work hand-painting the roads, and our composer Richard has been doing some amazing work on the procedural soundtrack - here's a demo! 

Note how the music changes, as the stats change.  This is a simple demonstration of how the procedural soundtrack responds to your gameplay - the final version will be AMAZING...

SO, HEY - Three years ago, I began work on Peace Island.  It was during an afternoon on one of my days off from my line-cook job.  After days of dithering, I finally sat down and started sculpting the terrain.

Did I think I'd be done, by now?  Heavens, no!

I still remember thinking, as I put down the first tree, "Here begins a journey of at least five years."  After all,  back then it was just Me, Laura, and a coder in Greece we could hire for bit work every time we saved up 50 dollars.  We were trying to create a HUGE, ambitious game that normally would require a team of dozens, in whatever hours we both could spare from our full-time jobs.

We knew full well we only had the slimmest of chances to turn our vision into reality.  After all, we had never created a game of this size before, and we really didn't have any reputation in gaming (Yeah, I had worked for Atari in the late 80's, but not much since.)  Our budget was next to nothing.

What's more was the fact that Laura & I were completely honest with each other, when we started: We knew that between us, we maybe only had about 10-15% of the total skills required to create a game such as Peace Island.

We just attacked the angles of development we DID have figured out, assuming (correctly) that we'd learn a lot along the way.  We also made some REALLY stupid decisions, early on...

The worst example of such was when I spent a few of the first months positioning every last rock, bush, and tree by hand...

Thankfully, this was LONG before I was asking for crowdfunding - I would have been INCREDIBLY embarrassed to have wasted so much of other people's time & capital.

The day I brought in the first cat and moved it about using the primitive free controller I had downloaded was the "Point of no return" for me...

You see, I had created that cat's texture to resemble a pet that had passed away two years before.  The moment I swung the camera around to the front, one of our older cats leapt onto my desk, meowing and poking her nose up against the face of the virtual cat...

SHE RECOGNIZED HER DEPARTED FRIEND, IN THE GAME - I was so amazed by the incident...  It gave me the first inkling that Peace Island might be something special.

After almost a year of working on whatever budget Laura and I could scrape together outside of our jobs, we attempted our first Kickstarter, which of course failed.  We made the usual mistakes of being presumptuous, asking for too much, and promising too much.

However, the Kickstarter campaign had been the first time the world-at-large had seen glimpses of the Peace Island project, and we got a lot of good local press.  We appeared on a local NBC affiliate's "Good news" segment, and got a few write-ups in gaming media around the world.

This gave us the confidence to try again - after all, we just needed help to get the project STARTED (It's not called "Kick-Finisher" after all.)  Thanks to the publicity generated by our previous campaign, we were moderately successful.  We raised enough money so that I could scale my hours at the kitchen back from 45 hours a week to 35, and have just a bit more time to work on the game.

Thanks to these first backers, we were able to take our rough concept, and turn it into something that actually FUNCTIONED.  We were also able to make the game look a heck of a lot BETTER...

However, we never expanded the team.  We would still occasionally hire the odd freelancer to assist with a bit of coding we couldn't handle on our own - but for the first 19 months of its existence, Peace Island remained a "Mom & Pop" operation.

It was far from smooth going.  We encountered roadblocks, bottlenecks, and bugs that stopped the project dead its tracks for weeks.  We only had one PC and our ancient MAC had to be upgraded, just be able to run the first tentative Alphas.

But we kept at it.  It was hard to lose faith in something that, even at this early stage, had developed such a community around it.  Even when our dev funds ran low, and I thought I might have to go back to 45-hour weeks at the kitchen, I never - for a single second - doubted the future of the project.

Peace Island was going to be finished - it was just a matter of "When."  If I had to go back to overtime weeks at the day job, all that meant is that the game's development would be unfortunately slowed - but I was determined that it would NEVER stop.

Thankfully, one night in July of 2019, a Patreon that I had set up several months earlier went viral.  In a month's time I went from a line cook, to a full-time game developer - Laura joined me soon afterwards.  

A month later, Laura & I were joined by others.  Extremely skilled musicians, writers, artists, and coders came together around this little flame, and have since built it into a bonfire.

Thanks to this immense pool of talent, I no longer think that Peace Island is years away from completion.  Yes- it's taking longer than we'd all like, but thanks to the support of folks like you, a 2021 release is within our grasp!

ONE LAST NOTE: THE ELECTION HERE IN THE USA IS OVER, AND WE HAVE RESUMED SHIPPING PREMIUMS.  PLEASE LET US KNOW IF YOU HAVE NOT RECEIVED YOURS, YET!

Thanks again for your support, confidence, and patience - it means the world to us!