PeaceIsland
patreon
It has been two years...
🕑 Added 2021-07-28 00:50:21 +0000 UTC...since YOU took a chance on an obscure project from a place that is better known for its lobsters and blueberries, than video games.
I must confess: My fingers are left hovering motionless over my keyboard for minutes at a time, when they are tasked with describing how much you have changed our lives, and the lives of so many others since then. I pride myself on my ability to communicate via the written word, so it is doubly vexing to discover I am still at a loss for words, two years later.
As our Press Kit mentioned, when Laura & I started this project in 2017, we had nothing but ideas, the few dollars we could set aside, and the occasional hour outside of our full-time jobs.
I didn’t even show the project to anyone for the first four months of solo development. When I posted the first screenshots to Reddit, I awoke the next morning to discover that a local radio station had seen them, and decided the project was worthy of mention. Two weeks later, Kyle Preston (the guy who created the soundtrack for “Prune”) got in touch, offering his works to the project.
These little promotions boosted our spirits, but alas, not our funding. A friend of mine repeatedly suggested crowdfunding, but I felt that the concept was still in such an early stage, it was hardly practical. Work continued as best we could, until after nine months, the day came where I was able to get a Peace Island build to run on another computer.
Yes- the framerate was abysmal at around 3fps, and the game took up to ten minutes to load - but IT RAN… Peace Island had graduated from a pet project, to a piece of software that could be distributed and tested.
A friend of mine had finally convinced me to try a Kickstarter, but I only agreed to it, if everyone donated a single dollar. I made it clear that the campaign would shut down if anyone donated more than one dollar - which someone immediately did, resulting in the campaign shutting down in less than six hours.
I continued work in my time off - optimizing textures, and baking huge assemblages into singular draw calls. We were able to get the FPS up to 20 on our test machine, and got a report from a remote tester in Washington that they were getting 10-15 FPS.
Around that time, the project was nearing a year old, and I was convinced to try another Kickstarter. I made the mistake that everyone does: asking for too much at first. However, my second campaign succeeded within 24 hours, thanks to the buzz the first one got online, and in local media (including a spot on the local NBC news!)
So, 11 months into the project, we finally had enough funding to get a second computer, and allow both of us just a little more time at home to work on the game. We were also able to bring in some freelancers to assist with our first rudimentary AI, and interactivity.
Over the next few months, the game went through a series of massive improvements that resulted in a more beautiful world that still took a while to load, but ran at an ever-increasing clip. The cats also got their first actual fur shaders at this time, as well.
In July of 2019, the project was 20 months old, and resembled just about every other niche indie game project at that stage: behind schedule, prone to crashes, and janky performance overall. However - the early, simple goals we had set were within sight, and we were able to consistently produce builds for both PC & Mac. Not bad for a two-man operation that ran on an average of $3.50 per day.
A few months prior, I had been convinced to set up this Patreon Campaign, which at that time was bringing in $50 per month. Let me tell you: that fifty dollars per month was the wind beneath our wings, once or twice. In fact, it paid for the first, primitive tide mechanism for the oceans of Peace Island.
However, as you might know, things changed RADICALLY on July 19. That was the day I awoke to find hundreds of emails flooding my inbox, with no time to read them as I headed to the diner for another shift behind the grill. I only learned during my lunch break that a Facebook post the previous night had “Gone Viral,” resulting in FAR more than $50 per month on Patreon.
That’s when you guys took the project to an entirely different level.
The next two months were a wild transition - procuring new machines and upgrading our existing ones. Laura and myself finally being able to work on the project full-time was a bonus, tempered by the dawning realization that most of my working hours would now be spent supervising the work of the talented people that had joined our tiny project (along with handling technical support, media outreach, social media, commissioning outside work, and a thousand other tiny details.)
The first challenge was a refactoring process - ya see:
A game like Peace Island is a huge endeavor, and Laura & I didn’t get everything right, the first time around. The terrain, along with all that sat upon it needed to be cut up into bits that could be streamed. The disparate systems that ran a half-dozen different NPCs had to be combined into one. The previous character controller was a frankenstein beast that had been pieced together by three different people - and what was more:
It was no longer acceptable that the game ran at 10-25 FPS on a mid-range gaming system - we HAD to produce a build that could meet market performance standards.
Fixing most of this required that Laura & I take a back seat for a few months, while everything from the project hierarchy to the game world itself was systematically restructured and optimized. We took advantage of that time to flesh out the story, and further refine the game world.
We worked with voiceover artists, musicians, and sound engineers to create the first version of the Peace Island radio broadcast. Visual artists assisted us in creating the first “Levelling card” concepts, and building a library of in-game art such as posters, logos, and newspaper comics.
In-between all of that, thousands of premiums had to be shipped out. Due to the wonky way we set things up on the Patreon, we’re always having to play catch-up in this regard - but shipments are still going out each and every week. Whether you are in Russia, New Caledonia, or Butte, Montana, we’re not happy until you get your postcards, and have a print hanging on your wall!
As the first COVID cases were reported here in Maine, we were anticipating that our Patreon support would drop by 80% in the first month. We spoke with our core developers about how we could keep things going at such a reduced budget, but our formulated plans turned out not to be necessary - and this, my friends, is the point where I must resort to all-caps:
YOUR SUPPORT HAS ALLOWED US TO CONTINUE DEVELOPMENT AT NEAR-OPTIMAL LEVELS, THROUGHOUT ONE OF THE GREATEST CRISES TO CONFRONT HUMANITY IN MODERN TIMES.
Again: this is why my fingers are left motionless over the keyboard, when I try to put into words how much your support has meant to not only the project, but also to Laura, myself, and everyone else who we are so fortunate to work with.
Thanks to our early Kickstarter supporters, two people working in a bedroom in their off-hours were able to turn a rough concept into an open world that functioned on a PC and a Mac - something that even Bethesda couldn’t bring themselves to do.
Thanks to YOU - our supporters here on Patreon - that world lives and breathes with far more speed and vitality than we ever thought possible in those early days.
Thanks to you, we have been able to weave a story that spans centuries - we have created dozens of characters that we cannot wait to introduce you to - and we have learned SO much along the way.
YOU helped to make this all happen.
YOU captured the imagination of gamers around the world.
YOU ARE AWESOME!
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THE PAST TWO YEARS, AND FOR THE DAYS TO COME - MORE DEV NEWS, IN TWO WEEKS!
Comments
Wonderful post Eric! Keep up the great work x
Peace Island
Thanks! We were doing weekly updates, but we wanted to take two weeks away, so we would have a LOT more to talk about, in early August.
What a beautiful post from beautiful people making a beautiful game ❤️🐾👍🐈 I look forward to every story you share because it gives so much unique insight into how and why the game came to be 🐱
