Addressing The Inevitable - And Why So Much Human Stuff, lately?

It should (unfortunately) not come as a surprise that, due to the recent shake-up in personnel, we have had to delay the release of "The Final Alpha" for 1 week.  This is because we spent a full week getting our server back up and running.

This means that you can expect the "Final Final Alpha" to be released in the first full week of September. 

We've put the project through much of the long-awaited "refactoring process" that we've mentioned frequently over the past few months.  It's led to a lot of improvements, but currently, it seems as if a lot of the atmospherics were somehow shut off on most levels, leaving us without mist, depth of field, and most of the other effects that made the game look so good. 

For example: you can see that the menu scene is missing trees, fog and all post-processing effects on all elements aside from the ocean.

It's my job to make sure they are all restored, by next week - I'll bet you ten dollars it's just a matter of a few unchecked boxes.

Now- while Peace Island is first and foremost about the cats, Laura and I have found ourselves working more and more on the far less interesting erstwhile Human Species.

If you were to go through our project WIKI, you would find multi-page articles about individuals that were born, lived, and died nowhere NEAR the state of Maine decades - or even CENTURIES - before the story of Peace Island begins.  

If I were to compare these individuals to anyone within modern gaming, they'd be like the "Nine Divines" of the Elder Scroll series.

Players won't HAVE to know about every one of these people to complete the game.  In fact, we are REALLY hoping that we can structure story progression in a manner so that the game will require several playthroughs to know EVERY story, and to experience the game fully.

We feel it's important to make sure each individual (whether they be feline, erstwhile human, or NPC) matters, are linked in a substantiative way, and there are ZERO loose ends.

This requires us to create a story that is not so much of a linear narrative, as much as a clockwork device in which each element moves in conjunction with all the others to move things forward.  

Each decision by the player is another tick of that clock, and if one gear doesn't mesh with another, the whole structure stops.  

SEE YA'LL NEXT WEEK - We'll have deets of the FFA release!  

Shipments of Art Print premiums start again within 48 hours - we're waiting for the arrival of backing boards!