Wading through hip-deep molasses outdoors in winter...

...is analogous to the process I find myself in, right now.  

After completing the Alpha version of the "Power Line Highway," I asked Laura to do a run-around, and discover where we were missing colliders.  She handed me a 24-page document that was both surprising and shocking.

Surprising in that there were so few, and shocking in that some of them were utterly baffling.

For example: the staircases on the docks were pretty much lacking any colliders at all, while sometimes one finds their way blocked by invisible monoliths in the middle of the forest that are unmarried to any discernable object or system.

But I knew all of this was coming.  Ya see:

In a hand-made world like this that has gone through so many generations of revision and alteration, these kind of artifacts and gaps are unfortunately inevitable. 

As the buck always stops with me, I knew there would come a day when I'd have to personally and meticulously go through every property, every prefab, and every staircase to make sure they were 100% compatible with the Beta version of the cat controller.  

It's admittedly slow going.  Usually, a given property will require about a day's attention.  The most exacting process is getting the staircases just right so that the cats can run and walk up each of them, without a hitch. Lemme tell ya: nothing's more frustrating than to climb 90% up a set of stairs, only to get caught on the lip of the porch - but we're making steady progress.  

Before, I'd approximate that only about 40% of the Island's staircases were Beta-Ready.  Now, we've got 60% of the staircases working without a hitch, with the rest set to be finished by this time next week.

Likewise, Laura's document has shrunk from 24 pages, down to 8.

In addition - we're getting rid of the final legacy "artifact" from the early stage of the game's development - the "playground" behind the school.  For some reason, that area escaped revision for almost three years.  As a result, it looked awful - like a "Gary's Mod" made in 1997 (and not a single collider.)

Within a few days, this area will become Peace Island Landing's "Community Garden."  These are common out on the islands, and we've been meaning to add this for quite some time - and yes, there will be catnip!

Also: In this current round of revisions, we're finally going to make all of the hedge bushes climbable.  Just like the "Power Line Highway," this will radically increase your cat's agency and mobility.

UNFORTUNATELY:

We decided to put off upgrading the project to URP for a couple of weeks, until we get all of these old problems addressed.  As a result, I did not have as much "Off Time" to work on in-game Patron name assignments, as I had hoped.  As a result, we only made it to around 10% of assignment assets made.

One of the hangups is that we're working on the more complex ones, first.

Understand: some folks wanted their names to just be on a few pieces of Junk Mail.  That's a pretty simple prefab to create.  Others wanted to be former Mayors, Librarians, or be featured on Wanted Posters.  These individuals would have their portraits on the walls, which necessitates a bit more work.

You see, the photos sent in by Patrons for this use were widely varied in quality, size, lighting, and angle.  Pics like those are fine for some individual portraiture, but not for the line-up of Peace Island’s former mayors.

This is another case where the latest generation of AI comes in handy.

We feed these submitted portraits of various quality into an image generation algorithm using a standardized list of criteria.  We then feed the result back into the AI, asking it to better conform with the original image.  This results in portraits of each patron that are of uniform quality, lighting, and resolution.

It is doubtless that some will need revision (the AI gets eye color wrong, occasionally,) but this process saves us COUNTLESS hours of Photoshop work.

See you again Monday - thanks so much for your continued support!