Holiday update.

To those who celebrate today as Christmas, we hope it was a happy one!  At Peace Island HQ, we took advantage of the day to order out for Indian food, and play video games.  Laura usually plays “The Sims,” and I worked to maintain a successful arctic base in “Rimworld.”

I need to get a mod, because after a certain point, the one thing our colony lacks is moar cats…

In advance of the new year, and another missed deadline, I will remember 2022 as “The Year When Peace Island Got Back On Track.”

Don’t get me wrong: Progress has been steady since day one, but as I’ve discussed on a number of occasions, this was also the year where I personally had to come to terms with how much time we lost, due to the machinations of a few scammers who worked so VERY hard to destroy the project entirely.

It was a very bitter pill to swallow - but I know that every day, I get closer to the point where I can just shrug that all off as a memory better forgotten.

Thankfully, our new lead systems architect Lance has been so efficient at his job, that the project advanced more in the last year than it did in the previous two. Just this last week, he finished the first iteration of a custom NPC controller that will integrate with the dialogue/quest system.

This is what we needed to create scenarios where your cat(s) will be obligated to follow other animals you meet throughout the game, as they walk, climb, and jump to a certain destination.

This being the last thing we needed for the public Beta we aimed for all those years ago, we recently asked Lance to give me a worst-case scenario for how long it would take him to finish the NPC controller.  He said he could not imagine it taking longer than three months - and we know that unlike certain past coders we have worked with in the past, we can take confidence in his estimate.

We know the legendary and oft-quoted wisdom concerning delays and deadlines:

"A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad."

Understand:  We’re not “rushing.” We’ve simply re-gained the pace of development we enjoyed during the early days. 

A great game is coming in 2023!

Postcard premium shipments resume tomorrow.  Print premiums were delayed, due to a lack of envelopes - more arrive on Tuesday.

See ya'll next week!