We invited you to discuss your worries with strangers.

It could have gone badly. But, you wrote each other millions of uplifting letters.

You made Kind Words an unlikely success. So we're inviting you back for more....

More ways to talk to people.

More ways to be creative.

More ways to be yourself.

Coming in 2024! Wishlist and signup for the playtest today!

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.


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.

If that excites you, please checkout the KW2 page and sign up!

Yours,
Ziba and Luigi

PS. Clark is back with a whole new soundtrack!

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:


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.

• 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
  
• Replaced Twitter link with Mastodon link[mastodon.gamedev.place]
  
• Removed the "3 Year" badge. Cause it's 4 years now.

With much gratitude for our players who are our favorites,

Ziba & Luigi

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.


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.

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

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

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!

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[melbourne.sciencegallery.com]. 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 http://discord.gg/popcannibal if you have questions.

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.

Well this is a cute little very specific update. In the last few days we've had an influx of players from China! Welcome!

You're doing a great job being kind to each other, but a number of players have gotten one thing confused: The report button sends messages to ME and LUIGI, the moderators. It does NOT send a message to the person you are reporting. You can't use the report button to talk back to people. Sorry!

This update adds one-time-only message from Ella the Mail deer when you make a report to remind you that you're sending a report to the moderators and not to another player.

I hope this is a proper translation :

You can not reply to people using the "REPORT" button.

您不能使用“REPORT”按钮回复他人。

This update also changes the description on the Abe Lincoln sticker to use the word "enslaved" instead of "slaves", because in this context we are talking about a burden put upon people and not an all encompassing definition of who they were. Thank you to the player who made that suggestion!

There's also a tiny increment in the version of Unity used for this release. Shouldn't change anything. Probably.

That's all for this update. I know it's been a while since we've had a meatier update. It may surprise absolutely no one who follows me to learn that I've been rewriting parts of the backend AGAIN. Lots of invisible work going on behind the scenes to make sure Kind Words has a long life and a stable foundation on which to grow.

Cheers!
Ziba