New stickers for everybody! You get a three-eyed duck thing! And a sleepy octopus! And .... a jelly...cube...with... bones? Maybe those are french fries.



Because Kind Words is a chill place and strives to be a bit of the opposite of traditional social media, we don't flash a lot of numbers in the game. No online player count. No ticker with announcements or tournaments. (note to self: what would a Kind Words tournament be?) So every now and then we get two questions:

1. Is anyone playing Kind Words?
   
2. Is anyone moderating Kind Words?

The answer to both is: heck yes, all the time.

Usage goes up and down, but on a slow day, we're still transmitting a couple thousand letters between players.

And we are moderating constantly and always improving our moderation tools. For every update to the game, I make 10 updates to the backend. Faster, smarter, stronger, purpler. Also, we. Hold on. Duck...



Where was I? Anyways, speaking of moderation, with this update we're doing two things to help keep things kind and on-topic.

First, we're letting people directly delete responses they no longer want to have in their inboxes.

Second, we're going to ask you to confirm some things before you try to do them like... are you trying to send a stranger your discord handle? Or your email? And we'll gently remind you that we gotta keep it anonymous to keep it safe.

Full change notes:

• New room!
  
• New stickers!
  
• Added the ability to delete responses you've received.
  
• Sorted unopened letters to show up on top of your pile.
  
• Will ask you to confirm before sending if it looks like you're breaking rules.
  
• Prevented the escape key from erasing what you just typed.
  
• Updated to Unity 2020.3.16

Thanks once more for living this wild experiment in caring with us.

Yours,
Ziba & Luigi

In a regrettable and unintentional lapse into excessively Anglocentric behavior, I did not account for the significant portion of the world that uses non-Gregorian calendars.

More clearly restated: It's not 2021 everywhere, in fact it's 1442 some places and those places could not play Kind Words after the last update. My apologies!

Also the screensavers weren't showing more than one airplane in a row. Booo.

So I fixed those things and to sweeten the deal I put a little more spit shine on the Room Screen Saver. Now the camera doesn't just float there, you get a tour of all your decorations while it's running.



Yours,
Ziba

We're at a year and change now and you haven't slowed down! You're still writing each other thousands of messages every day.

We are humbled to have Kind Words become a regular part of so many people's lives and, in keeping with long-standing international custom for developer-player relations, we offer you this traditional gift: a giant, looming beast and some mittens.



In fact, since you've exchanged well over 3 million messages, we are soaring past the the beast-mitten requirement to bring you:

• A new room in a warm wooden cabin with a string of twinkling lights!
  
• Steam trading cards!
  
• 10 new stickers! Each with matching room objects. Including this guy...

What the lil' green penguin is saying is that we've also made a host of less sexy, but desirable little changes too.

• More efficient and error tolerant network code.
  
• Autofocusing on text input fields whenever they appear.
  
• The request list is refreshed every time you view it.
  
• Fixed a bug which could cause new stickers not to get the big fanfare they deserve when first seen.
  
• The options menu can now be accessed from the title screen.
  
• Lowered the volume. Why was it so loud?
  
• Updated the underlying engine to Unity 2019.4.18.
  
• Showing a "connecting..." message on the title screen if it's taking too long to connect. So that you know what it's up to. It's trying to connect.

It's a joy to watch you help each other and a privilege to shepherd your voices.

Take care out there. We're in this together.

Yours,
Ziba and Luigi

It's been a year since Kind Words launched on Steam! And what an incredible birth of a community is has been!

You've exchanged over TWO MILLION messages. More importantly, we keep hearing from people how much those messages mean to them. We'd love to take credit, but you all put your hearts on your sleeves and you all responded. So please take a moment to recognize the gifts you've given each other.

The best thanks that we can think of is to keep it fresh with new content.

If you really want to set the mood as you read on about the AMAZING NEW STUFF, here's a treat:
Kind Words' composer Clark Aboud has rearranged one of his favorite tracks, Lavender, for a trio of electric guitars!



The new Evergreen room is like bright sunlight filtering through leaves above.


I don't want to spoil all the surprises, but there's an Axolotl and a ghost. And they're cute as fu...n times ahead for everyone!


We know a lot of you are leaving Kind Words on in the background to listen to the music or wait for replies. So now you can do that with style. We've included three screen saver modes which fade out the UI and intensify the chill. (One can intensify chill, right?).

Even better, the screen savers have an option to automatically display airplane messages from other players. You've written about 400,000 airplanes. And now you can just relax and let them float directly in to your heart.

Hmm. This is getting a little saccharine.

Good thing I saved the least emotional bits for last!


That is, unless you get weepy about ultra-wide monitors. Cause baby: we now have much better support for ultra-wide monitors.



Or maybe your heart has been yearning for this little checkbox:


Also:

• Fixed a couple problems preventing Ella from alerting you about new letters.
  
• You can cancel out of reporting a message without selecting a reason first.
  
• No more sending empty airplanes! People weren't really abusing it. But it was silly.
  
• The scarecrow sticker is no longer sideways in a bunch of places. That wacky guy.
  
• Upgraded the game engine (Unity) to 2019.4.10
  
• Somehow the whole thing is a couple megabytes smaller. Not really sure how that happened. Bit gremlins probably.

With sincere appreciation for all your kindness,
Ziba and Luigi

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