Bryn Oh has a short article up about MadPea’s UNIA opening the 27th of this month. See it here: MadPea’s UNIA.
The UNIA countdown clock is here: UNIA The Game. As of today, 4/20, we are 7 days out.
UNIA is a project MadPea started in 2012. It was planned to be an interactive, immersive game with 1st person shooter elements. The plan was to develop the game in stages, mostly due to the limitations of Second Life™, the game platform in this case.
In February 2015 Kiana Writer posted about the difficulties of developing the game, the cost, and the number of times they almost gave up. Consider paying US$740 per month during development. Kiana doesn’t say how many months the regions the regions were needed, but that is $8,880 per year.
That cost thing leaves me wondering why they didn’t develop in OpenSim and then finish up in Second Life… One can test for compatibility issues using the SL Preview grid…
Kiana gets in to what publicity did to the project. I gather Kiana has never managed a volunteer effort, not that UNIA development is exactly that. But, the influx of people Kiana was dealing with makes for a similar scenario. This psycho-emotional hit was obviously one of the hardest to deal with.
As you read Kiana’s article (Feb 2015 – UNIA – A dream that almost turned into a nightmare) you find out the part that Blood Letters, Buried, and other MadPea games were playing in the development of UNIA. They are providing the funding needed to develop UNIA.
Quoting Kiana from February: “Stay tuned as we will start to promote UNIA soon.. and please, check out the most boring game ever, BURIED.” You’ll have to check out the A dream that… article to understand why Kiana used the adjective ‘boring’…
Buried is one of MadPea’s most successful games. You had until March 31 to play it. If you missed it, you missed it.
You’ll find more information about UNIA on the new MadPea blog and web site: http://www.madpeagames.com/
For the Apil 24th Pre-Opening Party you can bid on VIP Early Access Passes, 48 hours early. See: UNIA VIP Pass Auction.
Quoting: “The bidding will start at 0L with a minimum bid increment of 100L. Come on over today to place an early bid, or you can join us in the Final Hour on Friday, April 24th at 11am SLT as we party down with DJ Kess.”
While OpenSim is an amazing platform and has a lot of value in it’s own right, it’s not really a viable option for the complex gaming systems we build at MadPea. OpenSim and SL are similar, but not identical, and we need script our builds in situ on the main grid in order to ensure that they work properly within SL. Minor scripting differences between OpenSim and SL make for lengthy tweaking once ported to the main grid, which would greatly hamper our development. In short: if we just needed the prim space, OpenSim would be ideal, but because we build interactive gamescapes, we have to be able to script them on the main grid.
Thanks for commenting. I haven’t had that much trouble porting scripts from OS to SL. But, I’m not pushing the limits as I suspect you are.
I’m looking forward to UNIA.