Hello. This is the first post of the Pizia devlog, a thing we’ve been saying we would start “next month” for approximately three years. I’m Santiago, I write code here. Quick rule for reading this blog: if something in the game moves, that was me or Martin. If something looks beautiful, that was Ezequiel. Keep that rule in mind, it explains everything, including the bugs.
If you never heard of us: Pizia is a small game studio from Córdoba, Argentina, and for a while now our entire life has been a game called Hayaku: Island of Darkness. It’s a 2D action metroidvania where you explore an island, uncover the darkness that infected it, punch an unreasonable amount of robots, and drive mechas. You can wishlist it on Steam, a thing I will mention again at the end because I have no shame.
If you did hear of us, it’s probably because you follow Ezequiel on Twitter, where the game has been appearing as beautiful GIFs since years. Maybe you even played one of the public demos at an event. In that case you already know the game, and you may be wondering why a game you personally held in your hands is getting an “announcement” post in 2026.
Good question. Sit down, this is a story.
The game Ezequiel made when nobody was looking
Hayaku did not start as a studio project. It started as Ezequiel’s personal thing, made in his free time, in an engine called Construct 3. He drew every sprite, he animated every frame, and he wired every mechanic himself, alone, for fun. Then it stopped being small. At some point “my little platformer” had an island with eleven areas, a mecha with interchangeable parts, a shop, a minigame, and a cast of characters with more personality than most people I know.
So he brought it to the studio, and the studio said the only reasonable thing you can say when someone shows you a project like that: okay, this is the game now. We started helping. The game went to events, people played the demos, people came back to play them again, and somewhere in there we all quietly accepted that this was not a side project anymore. This was the thing.
A love letter to Construct, and also a breakup
I need to say something clearly before the jokes start: Construct 3 is a great tool. Hayaku exists because of it. An artist with no programming background built a whole metroidvania in it, by himself, and that is not a small thing to say about an engine. If you want to make a 2D game and you don’t code, I will recommend it to you with a straight face.
But.
Construct works with something called event sheets, which are like visual programming: conditions on the left, actions on the right. For a small game they are lovely. For a game with eleven areas, thirteen weapons and a mecha wardrobe, they become something I can only describe as a crime scene. Hundreds of sheets. Invisible sprites doing load-bearing work. Logic that three years ago made perfect sense to one person at 3am, and that person doesn’t remember either.
None of this is Construct’s fault. The game simply grew past what the tool was designed for, and we were spending more time fighting the project than making it. Every new feature took longer than the last one. By the end of 2025 it was obvious to everybody, and we took the decision that every developer fears and secretly dreams about: we would port the whole game to Unity.
It may be a cliche and I mean it sincerely: it’s not you, Construct. It’s us. We got big. We wanted things you were never supposed to give us. And this is more of a “see you at some other time” than a “Farewell”.
How to make the same game twice
The first Unity commit is from November 10, 2025. Since then we’ve made around 1,700 commits, which sounds impressive until you know that at least thirty of them are called “fix” and one of them is called “fix fix”.
Here is the thing nobody tells you about porting a game: the code is not the hard part. The hard part is the feel.
Hayaku’s whole identity is how it moves. The name literally means “hurry” in Japanese. People who played the demos remember the speed, the dash, how the jump carries you. That feel lived inside Construct’s physics, in its exact gravity, its exact acceleration curves, its exact frame timing. And none of that comes with you when you leave. You get the sprites, you get the ideas, and you get an empty engine that moves like a stranger.
I said, out loud, with my whole chest, “a jump is a parabola, how hard can it be.”
I want the record to show that I suffered for that sentence. We rebuilt the movement system I honestly don’t remember how many times. Gravity curves, jump arcs, how fast you stop, how the dash cuts through everything. Getting one jump right costed us weeks. And our quality control process was not a spreadsheet, it was Ezequiel. He would take the controller, do two jumps and one dash, hand it back and say “it’s not the same.” He could never explain why. He was always right. As a programmer I cannot express how irritating it is to be debugged by vibes, and how useful.
The other half of the job was archaeology. To port a mechanic, first you have to find out how it actually worked, which means diving into event sheets from years ago and reading them like ancient scrolls. I would open one, find a condition like “if player is overlapping invisible sprite 3, disable invisible sprite 7”, close the laptop, and go for a walk. Some mechanics we ported. Some we understood first, and then ported. It’s not always the same order as you’d hope.
Okay, but is it the same game?
People who played the old demos ask me if the Unity version feels the same.
No. It feels better. And I say this with the confidence of a man whose artist can no longer say “it’s not the same”, because now when he does his two jumps and one dash, he nods.
That was the deal we made with ourselves when we started the port: the game had to come back feeling right, or the whole thing was pointless. What we didn’t fully expect is what happens after it feels right. Because once we weren’t fighting the project anymore, we started adding things. Nine months of pent-up “wouldn’t it be nice if” all came out at once.
Some of what’s new since the Construct days:
The island got a transit system. There’s now a fast travel network, because the island kept growing and your legs are only two. Finding a new station and turning it on is its own little joy.
New toys for your hands. New weapons and movement abilities that never existed in the old demos. I won’t list all of them, but I’ll say one of them is a drill that grapples to ceilings and lets you swing like an idiot, and it’s currently my favorite thing in the game. There are also bombs now. Everything is better with bombs.
New faces that want to kill you. The enemy roster grew, and old enemies got smarter and meaner. Ezequiel keeps drawing new ways to die and I keep programming them, and neither of us has questioned this arrangement.
[GIF: the drill grapple swing, one clean loop of latching to a ceiling and swinging through a gap. If we can also get one of a new enemy being horrible, even better.]
The game can lie about what machine it’s running on. This one is for the freaks like us: there are display filters that make the game look like it’s on a CRT, scanlines and all, or on a Game Boy, that green kind of nostalgia. They’re toggles, you play the whole game with them if you want. We spent an amount of time on these that no reasonable producer would have approved. We don’t have a producer.
And if you played a demo and you’re now thinking about a specific weapon or a specific mode I didn’t mention: it’s not gone. It’s in the queue. We’re rebuilding a big game piece by piece, and we refuse to bring a piece back until it’s at least as good as you remember it. The irony of a game called Hurry being remade this carefully is not lost on anyone here.
The part where I answer the question you’re already typing
When does it come out? I read this question in your voice and I felt it in my body. Look: if I write a date here, some future version of me has to honor it, and I protect that man. It comes out when it’s ready. Wishlisting it is, coincidentally, the best way to make the waiting feel productive.
Is development going okay? Yes. Honestly yes. The port was the scary part and the scary part worked. Now we’re back to the fun problem, which is making more game.
How often will you post here? I will not promise a schedule, because I’ve met us. But there are posts coming: one about the tools we built to survive the port (I’m saving that one, it deserves its own space), and Ezequiel keeps threatening to write about the art, which you should want, because he’s the reason any of this is nice to look at.
The shameless part
I told you it was coming.
If any of this sounded good, wishlist Hayaku: Island of Darkness on Steam. It genuinely helps more than any other single thing you can do, and it costs you one click and zero regrets.
If you want to see the game move instead of reading me describe it, Ezequiel posts GIFs on Twitter and they’re better than anything I wrote here.
And if you want to hang out, argue about mecha parts, or watch us slowly lose our minds in real time, the Discord is open.
Thanks for reading the first one. There’s a lot of island ahead.
Thanks, from us, to everyone at Pizia, past and present, and everyone outside Pizia as well, who helped carry this thing. You know who you are.