Isle Devblog #1

Isle DevBlog #1

Survivors? Islanders? What even do we call all of you at this point, something to consider for the future as we do more of these Dev Blogs. We’ve been watching Discord, Reddit and the commentary on many of the content creators’ videos, streams, and even our own chats. We wanted to open this blog up by forcing the big man himself to write a bit about what he has been specifically dealing with and some insight into the decision making process that happens when we bump into issues.

Director - Don - Dondi

Hey everyone, Dondi here.

A few weeks have passed since we’ve entered the quarantine, which thankfully hasn’t really affected much in terms of work flow. Most of it has been the “business as usual” which is cleaning up the edges of the jungle and trying to visually optimize things so at a distance a player can see adequate pathways and natural flows of animal traffic.

Recently we ran into an issue of map size with Isla Spero. These issues are undocumented, as we have pushed UE4 past its normal limits of single-server map sizes with our scope. In simple terms this means “If you want to host Isla Spero, you need several servers,” which we all deemed unacceptable. We’ve tried pretty much every solution and have reached out directly to Epic to see if they have anything hidden under the hood that may help. In short, I don’t want communities to be an endeavor for only people with a lot of expendable income, especially during times like this. Server sharding requires a lot of money and engineering time, and I wanted anyone to be able to create something for themselves. I do have one guaranteed solution to minimize Spero by cutting out some of the ocean, but the amount of time it would take would result in another delay and I’m not allowing EVRIMA to be delayed any further.

Since we aren’t directly solving the issue in this exact moment, our circumvention of this problem is another island I haven’t talked about. We as a team have several other islands that have been rendered out and finalized in terms of landmass properties that I work on when I need a break from Spero. However, we have not spoken about them at all, opting for the Valve approach of silently releasing into the night. My distaste of releasing in this order is probably only felt by myself, as the islands being seen out of order gives you all future glimpses into the world and story of the Isle and then going back once we release Isla Spero, which I’m not a fan of as it relates to the story I want to tell. As for physical properties, it’s not as natural a feeling as Spero’s landscape, but rather a physical mix of Hawaiian style ridges and harsh peaks mixed with the spires and craggy outcroppings seen in various fictional depictions of Skull Island that break up the valleys and deltas that host the majority of the island’s life. We'll share more renders of that island in the coming weeks but heres the first of the images we've got to share.

Business & Marketing - Christopher - ParadymShift

I think by now all of you are pretty familiar with me as the man who pushes around the paperwork and coordinates our branding, marketing, and communication. Since I’ve joined the team my initial job scope has expanded to include handling all of our