Hello there!

I'm Harry, the team lead/producer at PIE - we have had multiple people interested in following us along in a newsletter format, so I'm putting one together and seeing what fits. This is going out on a couple of platforms so far but will be focusing on posting more updates about Sight Unseen and PIE to https://piexp.itch.io/sight-unseen unless I find a better platform for these - I like having as little links as possible.

The Demo Is Here!

Thank you everyone who has waited eagerly for the release of our demo after EGX just over a week ago. It's finally here!

Oops

The current demo of the game is the same as our EGX one, hopefully with maximum bug fixes, but if there are issues you find or gameplay feedback and ideas you would like to share, I have opened the Discussions board and comments for this, please do get in touch as this project is very much born from the phrase "Wouldn't it be cool if you could do X"!

If you are struggling to play the game, get in touch with me (https://harrypet.ch) and I can send raw gameplay footage if you are a content creator who needs help getting some.

On that topic...

EGX was mindblowingly awesome, thank you.

We are still blown away by how great our time at EGX/MCM was, just over a week ago now. Sight Unseen has been a concept cooking in a proof-of-concept form since September 2023 and its current iteration since June 2024, and it was so extremely validating to see the positive reception from every person who looked at our game in the Rezzed Zone, or found us online through the VR Games Spotlight.

So, thank you so much to all the content creators, journalists, UploadVR and Callum Hudley with the VR Games Spotlight and anyone who has taken a look at us with their (non-detachable) eyeballs.

I was particularly blown away by how many nice and enthusiastic people there are in the VR development space - it was so nice to meet and be brought into an entire community who got the idea we are going for. Very cathartic since we were always worried about sticking to our guns with a very risky, niche idea that was aggressively uncommercial... It turned out for the better. I hope more game developers take on more experimental risks like us. It's the fun part of the medium, IMO.

And of course, massive thank you to Ollie, Keir, Bee, Maja, Thalia, Milla and Salla for being great and super flexible not just over the weekend but the whole project. Wouldn't have been possible to get the project to this state where it could be publicly received without you all <3

When is the full version releasing/what is next

Complicated answer to this one!

We'll continue working on this game, but you shouldn't expect a full release for Sight Unseen for at least a year (probably longer): some of these reasons you can find below. (Although, that doesn't mean going radio silent, expect newsletters every couple of months or so)

Some realities of the games industry right now: we are all looking for stable entry careers into the games industry (hint hint, I can vouch for everyone on the team as great workers) and creating an indie studio and diving into it full-time is not stable. Also, on a technical level, Sight Unseen needs us to have a bit more experience for us to go from this "early access" demo to landing as a full, polished release. This means upgrading to Unity 6, trying to move the game over to URP, seek shader solutions for some of the cybervision choices, and evaluate the direction as of this demo. I'll do another newsletter in a month or so with a post-mortem on the game as it stands!

However, afforementioned VR devs at EGX have given us some interesting leads and advice that we didn't originally consider, so I'm asking the right people about those and seeing all our options. Most likely, some of us will carry on tinkering away as a side project so we can have a healthy relationship with gamedev and find stability first.

Again, I'll keep you all posted, as it's genuinely awesome that people want to follow this project so we want to make it happen.

Sneak peek for fun

But I DID recently give Ollie the keys back to the repository and he already sent this WIP prototype:

That's all for now. Hopefully you will get an email for every time I do one of these! Have a great day.

-Harry