Beta Bugs, Mac, Narrative Window Dressing, and Next Week's Update.

Peace Island HQ has finally shaken off the flu that left both Laura & myself incapacitated for almost a week.  Judging by the fact that there was no cold medication to be found at any store, we were not the only ones.

However, as we rid ourselves of that bug, new bugs appeared in the game, as we finalized the integration of the quest/dialogue system.  Particularly: all chickens seems to have disappeared, and deer suddenly just started floating gently skyward.

Add that all to the list, I guess.

So- we have had to re-focus our efforts on the Mac.  Before, we tried to get the main scenes working within the Unity editor on the Mac side.  That approach has led to two months of very little progress, and a heck of a lot of frustration.

Fatal errors keep cropping up on the Mac side that are either non-existent or absolutely harmless on the PC side.  So, we have decided to temporarily "scale back" our approach.  We are currently simply trying to get the "Jungle Gym" scene working and exported on the Mac side.  This is the scene that contains all of the activities that the cat can do (including driving the golf cart,) but nothing from the main exterior.  

We are (sincerely) hoping that this export/build works - if it does, we will IMMEDIATELY realease it for our Mac-Using patrons.  Further, in this process, we hope to identify & eliminate a few possible causes of the bugs that have plagued this Mac release (like none of the previous nine releases we have made for the Mac...)

Just like everyone else on the internet, we've been fascinated by OpenAI's GPT-3 AI-driven Chat.  Not so much because it can create endless streams of unintentionally hilarious poetry (which it certainly can,) but because it offers a solution to a particular in-game problem that has vexed us for quite a while:

Narrative window dressing.  

Consider the amount of text that you happen to come across in a single day - the articles you scroll through, the horoscopes and weather reports, the lists of ingredients on a package of cereal, the post-it-notes you might see on a colleague's computer...

90% of that information has absolutely no impact on your life, so you routinely ignore it.  But- imagine if that same information - the stuff you routinely ignore - was suddenly gone, or replaced by "lorem ipsum" style greeking...

That same phenomena within Peace Island would break a great deal of the immersion we were hoping for. However: we couldn't really hire a published author to write the dozens of weather forecasts, nebulous pieces of paperwork, and horoscopes (among so many other things) that would be required.  If we tried to copy and paste, it would be evident.

OpenAI can generate all of these, and keep each one original.  

Of course, we are not asking AI to write any part of the game.  We've found it rather buffoonish, when it comes to actually crafting narratives.  That having been said, it can generate all of the narrative window dressing that would otherwise take us days & weeks to produce.

This doesn't mean that you can just safely ignore all of the text you come across.  You never know what you might find.

So - this is something that rarely happens, but we believe it is time to address it:  Patrons who are elligible for mailed premiums should be VERY careful to include their full mailing address - and it would help to make absolutely sure that it is typed correctly before you hit "send," because of incidents like this:

This Art Print premium made it all the way over to Norway, before it was turned back, due to the address we received not being accurate.  What is more: this patron was lucky, because we actually got it returned by the receiving postal agency.  A lot of times, we never hear about it, until the patron alerts us six months later.  

Again - this has not happened often.  However, when it does, it causes delays, and costs us a few more dollars to re-send.  

NOW- THE NEXT UPDATE WILL BE NEXT FRIDAY, AND WILL BE MEMBERS-ONLY. We have not done one of those in a while - We hope to have a gift for everyone!

Thanks again for your Confidence, Patience, and Support - it means the world to us!