Three steps forward....

We've been making a lot of good progress over the past two weeks!  Before I get into the back-end stuff, I wanna hit ya'll with the eye candy:

I'm VERY pleased to say that Deer have returned to Peace Island!  For some reason, they disappeared about nine months back.  I believe this was due to some minor miscommunications between myself and the devs, because their re-integration was easier than I thought it would be.

We were also able to bring in the new Geese animations, although the AI temporarily blinked out of existence, resulting in them just wandering off westwards in single file.

This has since been fixed, of course.

We've also ALMOST finished the registry of Patron in-game name mentions thus far submitted.  I'll be sending a confirmation email to everyone who has submitted theirs within the next few days.

The most popular mentions are at the Library, the Vet's office, the Art Gallery, the Lighthouse - and it seems a LOT of folks like the idea of their name being converted to a slick graffiti tag!

Now, I'd be remiss if I did not say:  if you are due to have your name mentioned within Peace Island, and have not received the questionnaire, please reach out to us at peaceislandllc@gmail.com.  Similarly, if you have received the questionnaire, and have not submitted your choices, please do so, ASAP!

IN OTHER NEWS:

- Our animator finished the new mice animations, and we're looking to integrate them by the end of next week, latest.  Fortunately, the AI is already there - we just have to plug the new actors in.

- Tangential to the issue of patron names, Laura & I have started to spend more and more time with Adobe InDesign and Illustrator, creating the dozens upon dozens of documents &  templates that will be required to flesh out the greater world of Peace Island.  This includes some really fun items - like maps, book covers and historical documents - but the majority of them are rather mundane - like dossier templates, envelopes and letter forms.

- Our composer, Richard, has been creating new pieces for the three currently-available interiors, as well as musical themes for all of the other creatures of Peace Island that will complement our existing reactive soundtrack.

- Work is still progressing on the first (Interior) "Level" of the game.  I have discovered that this is where the rubber has finally met the road, as far as development of game mechanics.  We're finally quantifying PRECISELY how much energy each cat gets from a bowl of food, a snack found in a garbage bin, or a treat hidden behind a couch.  This carries over to the impact toys, catnip, and resting areas have on variables.  We're also on the cusp of roughing out the climbing mechanism - something  LONG overdue!

- I finally found time to turn an island artifact into a game asset.

A few years ago, I found this metal plate half-buried in the deeper island woods of Casco Bay.  Given its art deco style, location and corrosion, it was apparently part of a structure that had most likely burnt down a century past.  I took a couple of hours off the other day to replicate the design as best as I could, so we could include it as a bit of detail on a few of the older structures around Peace Island.

We are on-track to release a new alpha, by the end of February!

YES- WE TOOK THREE GREAT STEPS FORWARD, OVER THE PAST TWO WEEKS...

And one step back...

If you happened to check out the rather overlong & verbose livecast I did the other day where I spoke about the stuff I've learned as a startup game dev, you'll remember a part where I spoke about an unfortunate necessity:

As a game dev, or a programmer in general, one must internalize the certainty that your hard work can - in the most arbitrary of manners - be suddenly deprecated, corrupted, or even (in the absolute worst of circumstances) lost.

In the last alpha, I took a bit of pride in that I had spent the due amount of time to hand-paint the new road system (seen above.)  Unfortunately, I awoke last Tuesday to discover that while the physical ruts in the road were still there, all of the painstaking work that had gone into the first pass of actually painting the roads had seemingly been lost.  

Upon learning this, many pairs of underpants were wrecked beyond repair.  Fortunately, after a few hours of poking, we soon discovered that all the work was still actually there...

The problem is: the moment the scene is saved, the connection between the terrain shader and the reference base color map is severed, and we lose all of our finer details...

It's quite vexing - but we're not gonna give up until we find a solution...

ONE LAST NOTE ABOUT PREMIUMS:

We received a new batch of prints, but shipments are temporarily delayed, as it appears that we fell victim to "porch pirates."  You see, we also ordered envelopes from a different company, and although they confirm their shipment, and FedEx confirms the delivery at the proper address..

We never got them.  I can only assume some passerby saw the compact package, and figured - given the weight - that it was electronics or something.  We're currently negotiating a new delivery.

Thanks again for your patience, confidence, and support - see ya'll in 2 weeks!