We like you too much to stop adding free things to Kind Words. And so I find myself sitting on a pile of 20+ new stickers that Luigi made which will soon find their way in to your letters.
We actually made all these stickers for Kind Words 2 (you did wishlist Kind Words 2, right?).
But since Kind Words and Kind Words 2 players can send letters to each other, everybody gets all the stickers! What are these stickers, exactly? I'm not telling. We have to keep some mystery in our relationship. But here's a teaser:
Kind Words will get these new stickers but, and for this I apologize, only Kind Words 2 gets the cool new rooms that go along with the stickers. I know, I know. I don't really want to create fomo. That's clearly not our brand. But we gotta save SOME shiny new stuff just for #2.
In summary, hang tight, do nothing and a batch of sweet new stickers will start showing up on your letters this year.
(also please, please wishlist KW2 so it does well and we can keep making free stickers forever)
Yours, Ziba & Luigi
Kind Words 2 free demo now! This week only!
Wanna be a little less alone today? We'd love for you to drop in and say hi through the Kind Words 2 demo.
We've put together a slice of the upcoming game for everybody to try out!
Have short chats with other players in the neighborhood!
Go in to the bookstore and swap media recommendations!
Hop in to the clothes store and try on all the (totally free) clothes!
Give names to strange cats!
Join the 100s of people already playing the demo, but don't wait too long. This demo will only be available this week to celebrate Steam Next Fest.
For more thrilling details, please hop on over to the new Kind Words 2 page. It would mean the world to us if you wishlist it today. Thanks.
Since this news item is specifically going out to Kind Words players, I want to explain how we're NOT splitting the community and how we WILL be supporting the original Kind Words.
Along side all its glorious new features, Kind Words 2 includes a remade version of the original game that is fully backwards compatible.
Kind Words and Kind Words 2 players can send letters back and forth to each other.
Every new Kind Words 2 player is also a new Kind Words player. Everyone is on the same server. Your letters, your stickers and your favorites are waiting for you no matter which version you play.
We're very excited to have everyone join us in our new lofi city. We've finished a lot of the game, but we've set aside time to gather feedback from people and make it even better. One of the ways we're doing that is using Steam's playtest feature.
Ok, now this is just getting silly. Kind Words has been out for four years and people are still writing THOUSANDS OF LETTERS EVERY DAY.
Well then, I guess we'll keep updating it!
Thanks to the big server overhaul we did last month, we can add something people have been asking for from the very beginning:
Favorites!
You can now curate a collection of your favorite airplanes and letters that you have received.
See an airplane you want to hold on to? Click favorite. Don't worry, You're making a copy. Its good vibes will still float on to the next person.
Really love a response you got and don't want to dig through your whole inbox to re-read it every time? Favorite it!
To read your favorites, just click the new heart icon.
Currently you are limited to having 500 favorites. We will be looking at feedback, player behavior and server load to see if that's the right limit. You can always remove favorites to make more room.
We've also added a handful of other improvements, because, gosh darn it, you're worth it.
Full Changelist
Added a favorites system
Moved the screensavers button to the "more" section
Updated help page text and links
Letter response font will auto-size if it's too long to fit on the page
Changed the quit icon from a pillow to an open door
Changed the decorate room icon from a face to a room
Made camera grain effect stay constant with screen resolution changes
Made the request input field behave like airplanes and responses when reaching the size limit
Fixed a soft lock that could occur if making a report failed
Fixed an issue checking the validity of a sticker granted by a thanks
Removed the "3 Year" badge. Cause it's 4 years now.
With much gratitude for our players who are our favorites,
Ziba & Luigi
Scheduled Downtime: 8/8/23 11pm GMT-4 for 4 hours
Short version:
Gotta turn off Kind Words for a few hours to update the server. Also, there's a small, fun update to the game coming soon.
Long version:
If you've been following along with our folksy little updates all these years, you may be familiar with this theme: We didn't expect Kind Words to be popular and I didn't design the server thinking lots of people would actually use it. That caused some growing pains for all of us.
A few years ago I started rewriting the server for better performance and extensibility. I don't want to jinx it, but I've actually tested the new server for high loads unlike when we launched the current one.
It's going to take a few hours to do the upgrade because our database is around 7 gigabytes in size and I don't want to lose any of your messages. So first I'm gonna backup the existing database, which takes about a half hour. Then I need to convert the database to my totally redesigned format. That should take about an hour.
Let's assume something will go wrong, double that and add a little and I'm estimating 4 hours.
Boy do I hope nothing goes wrong.
The best thing about this server update is that it will let us do some new things with the game. And I know that everyone longs to open steam to be greeted by a monologue about server upgrades, so to thank you for your attention, I'm going to reward you with a tease for our next game update: we're adding a "favorites" system so you can curate your own little collection of the kindest of words.
Kind Words Vinyl Record!
Players have been asking for a record for ages. Sorry it took us a while to get here, but we wanted do it right.
Records are about the music (and you'll get Clark's beautiful tracks), but they're also a keepsake. A physical manifestation of your personal connection to a feeling you love. That's why we crafted this as a little bundle of the best parts of Kind Words made real.
That's why you get:
Clark Aboud's lo-fi & dreamy tracks
A choice of "Pink and Violet Firefly Swirl" or "Midnight Purple Mixtape"
Two postcards to write nice letters on and send to people!
A sheet of stickers from the game! You could put them on the postcards!
It's like you're playing the game in real life!!!
Heartfelt letters from the team!
A portion of every record sold will be donated to the National Alliance of Mental Illness of Massachusetts.
Bring a little joy in to your life AND those around you!
https://manawave.co/products/kind-words-lp
3 years!
This week marks 3 years since Kind Words launched! That's 3 years and over 5 million letters and airplanes shared between strangers lifting each other up. While it's amazing to us that Kind Words found an audience, it's shocking and humbling to us that you're all still here! After all this time, you're still writing thousands of messages every day!
I still can't believe we get to facilitate this wacky experiment-turned-way-of-life. Luigi and I try to honor that privilege by moderating the game 7 days a week. Being such a small team, we're especially grateful to the community members in game, discord and forums who help with questions.
One funny side effect of the never ending parade of new users is that statistically unlikely problems become, well, more likely! Lightning strikes, cosmic radiation, internet gremlins, literal bugs inside computers. None of those seemed important to prepare for in 2019 when we were making a game we thought 100 people would play.
Anyways, that's my excuse for why a mangled save file could confuse the game and prevent it from running. Today's update includes a much better effort at making Kind Words save files fault tolerant.
If Valve accidentally turns all your cloud saves in to cat jpgs, Kind Words will no longer overwrite your local save with it and try to load it.
If you cut and paste a recipe for baked cod over your local save file. Kind Words can't bring it back. I'm not magic. But at least now it won't just stop working, it will open the save file manager and explain that it can't read the save file.
We also included a cute little 3 year celebration emblem on the title screen.
Thank you so much for being a part of this. Your support has motivated and empowered us to keep Kind Words running and to work on other projects, some public (wishlist Cyrano!) and others that we're not ready to talk about just yet 😉
Keep on being kind.
Yours, Ziba & Luigi
Save File Manager
How sexy is that, right? We added a save file manager! Even better: I recommend you never ever use it! Wow! These updates just get better and better!
In all seriousness, for 99% of people you don't need to ever think twice about your save file. There should be only one and there should be no problem with it.
However, this save file manager is for you if: * You're on a mac and your save file seems to have disappeared recently. * You don't use steam cloud but you manually copy save files between computers. * Something really weird that shouldn't have happened, happened.
This new tool, accessed from the options page, will help you discover and select what save file to use.
Hopefully on to funnerer stuff now!
Screensaver font scaling and MacOS steam cloud fix.
I finally fixed Steam Cloud Saves on MacOS. Sorry it took so long. I had to do some things. Like get a mac.
As a tiny bonus, I've added a font size slider to the screensaver modes for all platforms.
Fun fact: the screensaver mode was something I wrote in partnership with the Science Gallery in Melbourne for an exhibit they made on Kind Words. I like to leave it running on an old screen in my kitchen so I can walk by and see people's words of encouragement throughout the day… and so that I know the server is still running and I don't have to panic.
Technical Caveat: If you used cloud save previously and then started fresh on a mac without cloud save, your old cloud save file may now come back and overwrite your fresh start. Don't worry, the game will detect this and backup your fresh save as kindwords.json1. You can verify that this is what happened by looking for kindwords.json1 in the same directory that the game will display to you when you use the "export" function.
If that happens and you wish to replace your old cloud save with your fresh start, use the in-game option to completely delete your current save. Close the game and then replace kindwords.json with kindwords.json1.
Hopefully this won't affect anyone and I'm being paranoid. But not losing your letters is pretty important to me. As always, reach me at support@popcannibal.com or discord.gg/popcannibal if you have questions.
Mac Rollback
I rolled back the tiny change on the mac version due to reports of missing save data. Very sorry for the trouble. Life is a grand mystery and part of that mystery is what the game engine I'm using snuck in to minor point releases of their stable release branch.
