So - the other day, something came up on our Discord...

You see: it had come to our attention that while we have spent a considerable amount of time behind the scenes, figuring out how we could make the game accessible to differently-abled people, we had (much to our embarrassment) actually not included any such individuals within the story of Peace Island.

We mentioned this oversight on our Discord channel, along with our intent to rectify this situation, and someone responded:

Actually - while people are physically gone from the picture, their artifacts and stories remain.  Through getting to know them, the cats can more properly make their judgement on the relative value of humanity.  While we are certain that some players will begin & end their first playthrough of Peace Island with the case of Humanity's fate already decided in their heads, we want to give our species every opportunity for a fair trial.

Humans are complex creatures, and just throwing a lot of empty outfits around a la "Left Behind" is just a cheap (and quite frankly COWARDLY) way of "dumbing down" the central philosophical question within the game:

ARE THE HUMANS WORTH BRINGING BACK?

In pursuit of presenting the player with making an informed choice, Laura & I have spent a LOT of time working out details of each and every human former resident - along with just about everyone in their family trees - some dating back centuries.

Now, a lot of gamers might call this sort of stuff "unnecessary window dressing."  That's because they unfortunately grew up in a world where 99% of the games available were made by studios who considered "story" to be superfluous:

"What- PAY a writer?  Screw that - they just make squiggly marks on paper!  The suits upstairs just gave themselves another raise, Kotick's gotten himself in trouble again, and we just need another three online shooters released in time for the holidays!"

We mention all of this, because after the last week of logistics concerning the core refactoring mentioned in the previous update, progression on technical features has slowed.  As a result, we don't have much in the way of technical stuff to show off in this update, outside of a screen grab of the upcoming Teaser Trailer - which we hope to finish by early next week:

The problem with progress on the story of Peace Island is that it is not so easy to show off as nice screenshots, or videos of new animations.  Just mentioning our influences would lead to spoilers, which we just don't feel comfortable releasing.  Perhaps that's another reason why the big studios don't generally feel like investing much in story: low immediate return on investment...

Fortunately, we CAN continue our intense work on the story, while the technical side in is temporary overhaul - thanks to our Patrons.

IN RECOGNITION OF THIS:  Next Friday (December 10,) we'll be doing a VERY rare "Patrons Only" update, wherein we will "tip our cards," and disclose a bit about  one of the many stories you will discover in Peace Island...

SEE YOU THEN!