Demersus Devlog #2 - New PC, Contest Rules Etc.

Surprise New Computer ✨

I know, I’m quite surprised myself, especially with how things are going with the economy and the AI bubble, but thankfully I was able to do a bit of a panic upgrade.

Unfortunately my current, trusty daily, has seen better days (it has remained pretty much unchanged since it was built ~6 years ago). It’s starting to show it’s age and I just simply need something better, newer, faster. The fact that the PC part / tech landscape is looking how it’s looking (I’m looking at you OpenAI) I decided to kind of just finally (panic) upgrade as it’s not looking like it’ll be getting much better any time soon.

I’m happy to report I should be receiving the parts in less than 2 weeks, hopefully, the transition process from my current daily to the new PC won’t take too long as everything is pretty tight and every day counts…

Picking the Final Engine Version

Because of the new PC coming in, the engine version issues just kind of stopped existing, therefore I’ve decided upon going with Unity 6.3 LTS (6000.3.4f1) which is the newest LTS version available as of writing this post.

Getting Familiar with Contest Rules

I’ve had a through look through ZTGK’s rules (as of now only the 2025 version is available) and nothing really caught my eye aside from these:

• We actually have almost 6 month of time instead of what I initially thought where 4!
• Although you do get a table, chair and electricity there AREN’T ANY PCs provided to run the games!
• You need to be checking your email constantly in the later / last stage of the contest (you need to respond in less than 12h on normal days and 24h on the weekends)
• If you’re one of the lucky teams that ends up in the semi-final you get the opportunity to do a little presentation about your game.
• The contest organizers (Łódź Tech) can do pretty much whatever they want with your game (including re-distributing it however they please).

The No Provided Hardware Issue

So, as mentioned above, turns out that even though the contest organizers provides some basic things, they DO NOT provide computers to run the projects on, meaning we had to figure something out ourselves. I wasn’t about to buy a useless abomination of thermal dynamics that is gaming laptop as I both don’t have money or want one, I also wasn’t going to lug around my new PC is my buddy’s old Peugot, so I decided to wait with selling my old daily for parts, finding some monitor, audio solution, keyboard and mouse and use that as our presentation device.

This is kind of both a blessing and a curse as it is a bit of an issue initially (I have to wait on getting the money from selling my old PC, it’s worth diminishes even more + we have transport and set it up ourselves), but on the other hand it means that we can optimize our game to run perfectly on it, same as console devs do. Plus no more guess work and unexpected issues / glitches / crashes caused by an unknown machine / config.

What’s Next?

Up next on the list is primarily finally getting around to doing the full Pipeline test and creating the initial “sandbox” testing environment for the upcoming testing and initial dev work.

“Just make it exist first, you can make it good later.”