Progress/Setbacks in Refactoring, Solid Gains on Steam, and our Position on NFTs in Games.

I am sorry that I have come to all of you a few days late.  We sat down with our lead coder, and put together a list of the 18 things we required for the release of the "Final Alpha."  

Out of those:

- Nine are done
- Five are either active works in progress, or are quick fixes.

Out of the remaining four, I've come to the conclusion that I'd be willing to sacrifice two, if we can get the other two done.

While this is not where we'd like to be, it's not bad, considering that due to the Christmas rush, we were not able to get the new computer that the refactoring process depended upon until the 29th of December.

In addition, this evening we learned that the COVID epidemic has again struck the families of some who are involved involved with the project, as well as my own.  

Now, in light of our policy on transparency, I need to be up-front with ya'll:  This - unfortunately - will cause small, unexpected delays in the short term.  

That having been said, this is an issue that just about every other small business in the world has had to deal with.  To Laura & Myself, the well-being of those we work with remains paramount.  

Work will continue.

In our first two weeks on Steam, over 1500 people have added Peace Island to their Wish Lists!  Considering we anticipated that we'd only get about 50 adds a day, this is a VERY good start. 

Also: Two people came close enough to the solution in our recent contest, to qualify as winners.  We will be contacting all entrants, but unless those two winners are willing to sign a mutual non-disclosure agreement, they won't know how close they came to the full answer!

I am looking into the possibility of doing a short demo on YouTube, February 6 - more news on that, next update!

NOW - WE KNOW THAT THERE ARE A LOT OF CONFLICTING OPINIONS REGARDING THE INCLUSION OF CRYPTOCURRENCY AND NON-FUNGIBLE TOKENS WITHIN GAMES, SO WE FELT IT IMPORTANT TO MAKE OUR POSITION ON THIS MATTER CLEAR.

Since we were fortunate enough to "go viral" in the latter months of 2019, and gain the support of gamers worldwide, we have - NEVER - taken that support for granted.  

That is why, in our earliest days, we declared that we would refuse to work with publishers that demanded in-app purchases and downloadable content.  

We believe that when someone pays for a game, they should get the WHOLE GAME.  In light of this, the aforementioned practices are a non-starter.  Likewise, the addition of any further financial transactions beyond the initial purchase of Peace Island is antithetical to our core values.

We consider ANY attempt at turning ANY Peace Island content into an NFT to be a gross violation on three levels:

1:  Because it was done without our permission.
2:  Because unless proven otherwise, it was done without the creator's permission.
3:  Because NFTs are just - well - stupid.

There is a lot more that we could say about this bizarre practice, but for the purposes of this statement we should really leave it at that.

Sorry we don't have any new screenshots this week- we'll make up for that, this Friday!