Hey all, it’s Pan from Ironshell Studios here again!
I apologize for our recent quiet spell, it’s been about a month since our Early Access release and we’ve been keeping our noses on the grindstone preparing future improvements and additions to the game. I wanted to let you all in on some of the stuff we’ve been working on, as well as a little more information about our team so you can get to know us and our development practices a little better. We're more regularly vocal in our discord community, but don't want to leave external users out of the bigger picture. As such, I'm starting this "Straight from the Forge" newsletter for times where we have extended gaps without patches, to let people see what's going behind the curtain.
To answer that question literally: all over the place. We’re a small volunteer team with members across the United States, Europe, Australia, and beyond. Most of our members don’t have direct experience working in game development, just a shared interest and a passion for learning through action. When we decided to make June’s Next Fest our soft release date, we committed as a team to grinding out improvements and updates from May through June of 2026. After the dust settled from the EA release, some of us took a little time off to recuperate and plan for the future while others shifted their focus to our next big-picture goals. I, myself, was temporarily out of the fray due to a medical issue which benched me for a while. All this to say: we’re a small team, but we’re still committed to improving Procelio daily. So, let’s talk about some of the things we’ve been cooking up behind the scenes.
This has been our big commitment for July, a whole game conversion from Unity HDRP to URP. Last patch notice I mentioned there was a history lesson, and if you’re the kind of person to read this newsletter then I think you deserve an explanation. When this project started, Universal Render Pipeline (URP) didn’t exist. It was either the Lightweight Render Pipeline (LWRP) which was targeted at mobile phone platforms, or the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) which was targeted at consoles and PCs. LWRP was not what we were going for, so we went with HDRP (to much pain). Eventually, LWRP was deprecated and replaced with URP, Unity’s plans for a more comprehensive render pipeline. Now a few years further beyond that, HDRP is showing its age and is being discontinued in favor of URP being the default going forward. URP has effectively eclipsed HDRP in most relevant aspects. While we put off changing render pipelines for a long time, we knew we’d likely have to eventually.
What does that change entail? A lot of busywork on our end, and a lot of improvements to general performance and minimum spec baseline on the players end. Changing render pipelines has constituted more or less a whole-game reimport and retooling- every material, every shader, every light, every scene, every part, and even some of the internal code for bot render functions has had to be updated to fit the new rules for URP. It’s been a lot of work, but I’d like to shout out Blade for taking on a lot of the work and refining the game with some better practices overall. The results have already been promising, massive cuts to the baseline performance costs for the game, over doubled FPS in-editor, and a large cut to the amount of VRAM and general memory used by the game. We don’t have an explicit release date for the URP branch, but it is approaching a stable state and we’re looking forward to getting it into your hands. Here’s some work in progress screenshots of the URP conversion process.
While we’ve been importing the existing maps to URP, we’ve been making adjustments to map structure, layout, and detailing to improve the gameplay experience- especially for ground units. This includes adding more space and cover around team bases, smoothing out terrain, fixing common sticking spots, increasing ease of traversal, and removing unneeded clutter that can get in the way of maneuvering mid-combat. These changes will be coming alongside the URP launch.
Coming up in our next patch is a big focus on clearing up inaccurate or misleading information in-game, as well as giving players more useful audiovisual indicators for things like taking and dealing damage, secondary weapons reloading, and more. This also includes cleaning up tooltips and stat blocks, as well as adding more readable stats for some parts. For instance, did you know the Cerberus UMRL has always fired two projectiles per-launcher in each salvo? it's true, but there’s no readily available information to know that in-game. We’re looking to improve clarity these kinds of inconsistencies going forward, so people don’t need to get a debrief from community members to know important information. This is all coming alongside our usual mix of bug fixes, QoL improvements, and polish.
The topic of Ground vs Air bots is a perpetual discussion in our community, and we’ve received a lot of feedback regarding the effectiveness of air bots vs ground bots since release. Our internal motto for balance has always been “air bots get kills, but ground bots win games”, but we think there’s a lot more work to do to make both of these playstyles feel fun and competitive. We used to have a kind of tempo with our updates where we would introduce an ground part one update followed by an air part in the next, but that tempo has been somewhat disrupted since 1.4. 1.3 was our major wing rework patch, and there hasn’t been much added to ground gameplay since then.
As such, we’re marking down a dedicated ground-focused update path for the near future, with a focus on improving ground movement QoL, as well as giving ground movement parts more unique abilities and features to give them more character and opportunity for player skill expression and interaction. One reason why experienced players tend to migrate to aircraft over time is the increased maneuverability and skill expression, and we think the current iteration of ground movement lacks anything substantial to provide more interesting interaction beyond “WASD and strafe”. We’re hoping to give ground bots not only some new parts to play with, but also give the current parts new life and new options for engagement. As a little tease of what’s to come, here’s a showcase of a new wheel remodel (and maybe something more) coming alongside these improvements.
We’ve received a lot of useful feedback regarding these issues and more in the past, and we look forward to hearing more ways we can improve the game going forward. We’re a small team with limited hands so we know our pace is slow compared to a more formal development team, but we appreciate you being here with us. Whether you’re playing the game daily or only popping in when something new shows up, we’re thankful for you for letting us do what we love. We’re not perfect, and we both have and are going to make mistakes, but that’s how we learn and that’s how we improve. Thank you for giving us that opportunity.
See you on the Martian frontier,
Ironshell Studios