Kind Words' big hearted players have written each other a million letters.

That's not counting the 300,000 paper airplanes with words of encouragement you've thrown.

No, that's specifically letters written in response to strangers' requests for comfort or advice. Almost every word and every minute of that time was focused on lifting up another person. You players have done something amazing!


The least we could do in response was to stick a cute frog in the game.

Also, we like you so much that we decided to do more than the least. Today we've added

• 10 new stickers
  
• each with a new decoration
  
• and a new blue room in which to enjoy them!

But wait! There's more!


You're writing so much more than we ever imagined that our interfaces weren't keeping up. We've reorganized the inbox. Now you can view your messages sorted either by newest responses or grouped together by request.



Both modes will stream in your letters from the server as you browse, allowing you to keep a library of hundreds of letters without your computer breaking a sweat. There are more improvements needed for our most prolific writers, but this should help!


There's a new options button!



Which goes to the new options menu!



It has toggles for toggling toggle-able options!

• A buffet of graphical options!
  
• You can change the signature that is automatically appended to letters!
  
• A wildly dangerous button for erasing your save game! (It does ask you to confirm)

• Big performance improvements for older machines
  
• A warning if you start the game on a computer that's probably too old to play it
  
• Link to the FAQ in help
  
• Minor visual contrast improvements on the help screen
  
• 27.8MB smaller, even with the new room!
  
• Updated to Unity 2019.3

Thank you all so much for playing!

Ziba & Luigi

It's almost time for an update to Kind Words!

Wholesome Games is having a showcase and we thought we'd chip in a fistful of wholesome by premiering a little trailer for our next update!

Tune in Tuesday, May 26th, 1pm ET to https://www.wholesomegames.com/ and learn the answers to all your burning questions:

• Is it stickers? It's stickers, right?
  
• WHAT STICKERS ARE THEY?
  
• Is there anything more than stickers? That would be neat.
  
• How long are you going to keep me away from my new stickers?

How can games change you? How can they weave reality, fantasy and aspiration into something other than escapism? Who got out of their pajamas today?

Happens live at the very start of the festival and then gets re-run till Tuesday. But all the cool audience members (like you) will be tuning in live.

Official blurb!

Panelists: Ata Sergey Nowak, Matthew Seiji Burns, Paula Rogers, Jörg Friedrich Alex Paterson, Ziba Scott

In this exciting panel we explore games and developers that utilize the uniquely powerful medium to create meaningful experiences about real world problems; provoking thoughts, increasing awareness and making an emotional impact to change the world for the better.

LudoNaraCon 2020

More lofi! More chill! More beats!

You may recall that Ella, the female mail deer, has a side gig bringing you fresh tunes every day that you write a letter. Well, she just found SEVEN more tracks. Just keep coming back to write and they're yours.

Mildly compelling backstory
Before launching, I daydreamed: "If this thing actually took off, I'd love to commission more music". Well, you all made my dream come true. Clark Aboud has produced 7 new tracks that go in to the game today.

They have a wider range of feeling, including a triplet of "Connector" pieces that are like deep breathing for your ears.

The new music is also now in the soundtrack DLC plus we've added lossless FLAC format recordings of everything.

More feelings
I'm so honored that people are choosing to spend their time here and proud of all the effort players have made to lift each other up.

Also, I fixed some bugs and tweaked some things!

Full changelog!

• 7 new songs
  
• Added a volume slider for sound effects (really just Ella's voice)
  
• Removed a game stutter when changing music
  
• Fixed a bug which would announce the wrong stickers on game start
  
• Fixed a song ordering issue when viewing the radio after unlocking a track
  
• Fixed the mental health link when composing airplanes
  
• Fixed a tutorial typo
  
• Fixed a bug which made letters with no stickers appear to have the Elegy sticker
  
• Upgraded to Unity 2019.4.11f1
  
• Did, like, 80 million things to the server to make moderation easier and prevent the whole enterprise from melting down.

You kind people have already written 250,000 letters to each other!

When we dreamed up this little trust experiment, we never imagined it would get this big. In fact, before launch I did a stress test on the server with 60,000 fake messages and laughed to myself "hah, we'll NEVER get close to that".

(Thank you all for bearing with us through brief server meltdown that followed.)

It has been a crazy few weeks improving the servers, fixing bugs, streamlining our moderator tools, and talking to hundreds people on discord, email, twitter and reddit!

It's a bit overwhelming, but we've been lifted up by your enthusiasm, positivity and fan art. More importantly, thank you for what you're doing for each other. It's a privilege for us to be facilitating such heart warming exchanges as are happening every minute through Kind Words.

We're blinking the joyful sparkles of astonishment out of our eyes now and getting back to work. THERE WILL BE MORE STICKERS! Just you wait and see ;)

Fun fact, I took so long making that sexy looping celebratory video that you've actually hit 271k already!

You can see the video with sound on twitter

We believe people want to lift each other up. This is your chance.

Over the last 2 months our Humble players have written over 50,000 messages to each other in Kind Words. They shared fears, joys, loss, exhaustion...everything. But most of all: encouragement.

oh god I'm so corny.

To celebrate launch day, we've added a few new features. The big one is...

Now you can click a button and all the letters you've received will be downloaded and saved in a pretty little webpage on your computer.

• Room decorations do a little dance when you click on them
  
• Added Australian mental health resources
  
• Remaining line indicator when writing
  
• Prevented accidentally fast closing paper airplanes by double clicking

Big update today for Kind Words Steam beta testers and Humble owners!


One of the weirdest, most wonderful problems I've ever had in my entire game design career is that Kind Words has too many people just bubbling over with kindness and clogging up the request queue with loving statements of support and joy!

What am I supposed to do, tell you to stop?!

So today you get paper airplanes. These airplanes are just the place for you to send your thanks to the world, to an individual, share an inspirational quote, or maybe even just scream and vent some strong emotions.

Your words will fly through everybody else's worlds and everyone can click on them to read our shared stream of thoughts.


Your inbox only shows you the newest responses to your requests for letters. This helps keep things speedy for the servers. Now there's also a full history browser that will let you chronologically browse all your requests and responses, no matter how many.

• Steam cloud saving!
  
• Updated mixes for all music tracks!
  
• Music volume slider!
  
• More reporting options!
  
• Secret stuff that's not unlocked yet but might turn out to be new stickers. Who knows?!

It's been a fantastic couple months leading up to the full Steam launch. Over 40,000 letters written! You folks are the best. Keep being kind and get hyped for beautiful new players you'll be talking to after the upcoming release!