Improbable Island Message of the Day (MoTD)
New Monthly Memento, Summer of Small Interface ImprovementsAdmin CavemanJoe – 2024-07-01 20:58:08 [Permalink]
Hey folks, this month's Monthly Memento is the Heat Wave, which is a new type of superweapon made by a startup company looking for investors. It's a shameless cash grab because I've just had to have some welding done on my car and also spend three hundred bucks on a new laptop; the more money we make this month, the more powerful this weapon becomes. Gimme yer money!
Also, this month's Bonus Monthly Memento is the Official Cat Commemorative Coronation Bowl, like the last few times we had a change of Official Cat (see previous MotD). You get it if you donate twenty bucks.
Like I said a couple MotD's ago, this is gonna be a summer of slow and steady interface improvements; you'll notice bigger changes on mobile, but for everyone most recently we've got some nicer jump links at the top of the Inventory page and some improvements to the Meat system that makes it take fewer clicks to cook a meal. If you've been wanting to level up your meatsmithing but were put off by the grindy interface, now would be a good time to revisit it!
Have fun!
~CMJ
Official Cat change
Admin CavemanJoe – 2024-06-19 19:49:38 [Permalink]
Some sad news; we lost Carl, one of our Improbable Island Official Cats.
Carl jumped onto my belly while I was out in the hammock one day back in, ooh, 2016 I think. I was just chilling there and from out of nowhere there was a flash of black fur and sudden pressure on my viscera, and I went "Oh, hello," and stroked him and wondered, even then, why I didn't jump in surprise. I think I passed some kind of test that day. He chilled with me for a bit until Emily came back from work and said "Who's that?" and I went "Dunno."
His sister Nola (Improbable Island's other Official Cat) turned up shortly after, and at the time they looked so similar that I thought they were the same cat but with radically different personalities from day to day. Nola grew round and soft while Carl maintained his pointy sleekness. They got to know us over the summer, and then when the weather turned bitterly cold we took them in, adding them to Harley, Stewart and Leo for a total of five cats and a baby on the way. Pretty full house.
Carl was a very chill beast in general. He enjoyed riding around on my shoulders like a scarf. He'd often wait for me at the head of the stairs so he could nuzzle me at eye-level; while he did this, he'd bow so I could skritch the top of his head. One day I bowed back, mimicking him, and he reached out and patted my head! The cat wasn't bowing his head down to show me he wanted pats, he was suggesting that I lower my head so he could reach to reciprocate. It took me bloody ages to realise that. From his point of view, this big daft pink thing had FINALLY gotten the point after months of him clearly and patiently demonstrating.
The vet said months ago that he had lymphoma, and he'd have a few days at most, and we could try giving him steroids. We did, and we got some unexpected happy months with him, during which time we spoiled him rotten and croissants became his favourite food and milk his favourite drink. He was active and affectionate and had a massive appetite. He stayed alive to eat my dinner and hunt the chipmunks in the yard.
When the time came, it came suddenly, too suddenly for Lap of Love to help, so we took him to the 24/7/365 emergency vet to see the kind lady with the good drugs. His pupils got very wide and his pain faded. I buried him between the trees, more or less where he jumped up into the hammock in which we met. There weren't as many roots as I'd expected and the ground was hard packed clay and coal, so his grave might well improve the situation there.
I'd already had the privilege of mourning him while he was still alive, before the steroids gave him a blessed couple of months of feeling like a brand new cat. I wish that he could have had the same death as Leo, with the very quiet woman with the heart-shaped face who knocked on the door with her bag of peace - or Stewart, who was fine one moment and gone the next with just enough time to take him outside and settle him on my lap. But he knew at the end he was loved, and gave me the slow-blink quiet purrs until he'd gone off to who-knows-where.
I'll have some more mobile improvements and other awesome things for you all soon. For now this is just me Telling The Bees. You are my bees. I hope you're having a lovely day, bees. Also if you're looking at your animal and going "Hmm, it's probably gonna be time to call the in-home euthanasia people within the next few days," I know it's horrible and weird to set up an Appointment With Death and then rattle around the house watching the clock, but these are the times we live in. Schedule it days in advance, everyone got pets in lockdown and these guys are SWAMPED and won't be able to come on short notice like they did in the before-time.
Nola is now our full-time Official Cat. Long may she (and her extra toes) reign!
~CMJ
June Monthly Memento, upcoming and ongoing mobile improvements, summertime hooray
Admin CavemanJoe – 2024-06-04 15:25:25 [Permalink]
Hey folks, June's Monthly Memento is the Guilty Gavel! You'd be forgiven for thinking this has something to do with Current Affairs, but it's actually a reference to me leaving the MM to the last minute again, any connection with that other guy is purely coincidental. Anyway, chuck it at a monster once a day to leave it stunned at the very thought of finally facing some fucking consequences for a change.
When I were a wee nipper and we had the six-week summer break it felt like a lifetime. I'd go back to school and pick up my pencil and it'd just flop about uselessly in my hand because I'd forgotten how to write. I was just reflecting on this because it's the last day of school today, and going "Welp, guess the Island is evening-work for the next month and a half," and apparently American kids get ELEVEN HECKING WEEKS OFF SCHOOL, so expect the summer to be less full of massive gameplay improvements like the Drives On The Map project, and more like another period of gradually sanding off the rough bits.
The next big change will be finally making Outposts mobile-friendly. This is actually a big problem, because right now people view the quicknav mobile interface as a thing that's a nice bonus when it's there, and when Outposts go mobile-good, we'll pass the tipping point where folk will expect mobile-friendliness everywhere, and will note its absence from other areas with frustration. Since smartphones got popular I've been giving mobile users a straw with which to suck the droplets of wine at the bottom of a glass full of sawdust. Every time I add a new mobile improvement I get delighted emails about how much you love the new straw, how much better it is at filtering out the plywood chips and bits of rusty nails. When we tip the scales, I'll get emails asking why the fuck is there sawdust in this glass of wine, and honestly that's a pretty reasonable question.
There are two stages to mobile outpost improvements - there's the links from the outpost into the shops (or facilities, bank and council offices and clan halls or even things like prefs and the new day menu or reinforcing the walls or whatever but I'm just gonna say "Shops" here because I'm not typing all that shit out every time), and then there's the links inside the shops that let you buy things or chat with the NPCs or whatever and return to the outpost. There are four ways we could do the mobile-outpost-improvement project:
1. Do all the outpost-to-shop links first and then make the shops mobile-friendly; while this is underway you'll enter an outpost and get a lovely menu that will disappear the moment you enter a shop, and that's shit.
2. Mobile-friendly each shop one at a time; while this is underway you'll enter an outpost and get a lovely mobile-friendly menu that only has half the shops in it, and this is even more shit because the newbies on their phones will miss half the shops.
3. Mobile-friendly all the shops AND do the outpost-to-shops links over the course of the next few months, and then upload/activate the whole lot all in one go. This is again a bit shit because while all this is happening, you lot don't see anything changing. Projects that take months, during which I'm working my arse off but you guys don't see any visible progress, are projects that I try to avoid these days because they're boring for you, they drag on for ages, and they take a toll on my own mental health.
4. Mobile-friendly each shop one at a time, uploading as we go, and then mobile-friendly the whole outpost all at once at the very end. This is the route I've decided to take, because it lets me do a bunch of small gradual improvements followed by one big awesome improvement without as much awkward half-done feeling in between. This is actually even easier than it sounds because I'm adding the outpost-to-shop links while I'm mobile-friendly'ing each shop, but just waiting until later to activate those outpost-to-shop links all at once. This also maximizes the "Ooh, lovely new straw!" factor.
Mobile users might have already noticed that eBoy's sucks a bit less now. Get ready for more of that. From now until August, I'm not doing any big massive changes, and you can look forward to the kind of slow but steady quality-of-life improvements that you'd expect from a fifteen-year-old website that has finally fucking calmed down a bit and has no more interest in the "move fast and break things" philosophy of software development, preferring instead to tread thoughtfully and make nice improvements.
Have (chill) fun!
~CMJ
May Monthly Memento, the Drive is on the map now
Admin CavemanJoe – 2024-05-09 14:32:47 [Permalink]
Hey folks, the Monthly Memento for May is the Foot Bags, because I've had so much basement flooding oh my goodness. Also, the long-awaited Drive Labs project is finally done, finished, uploaded, live, running right now! This update extends the endgame by placing seven derelict laboratories scattered around the Island. One contains the Improbability Drive, and the other six contain... other things. Mostly good things - permanent atk/def increases, cigarettes etc - and one or two spicy ones that might involve a bit of luck.
So now, when you hit Level 15, instead of hunting around the Jungle, check out the Comms Tent or venture out onto the map!
I won't spoil things too much, but to anticipate your questions: the labs will move randomly around the map, so don't go thinking "Wow, it'd be cool to set up a Place right next to a lab" and pounding in land claim stakes. Also, some labs will be in the same location for all players, and some will be in different locations for different players - I'll leave it up to you to figure out the details of how that whole system works, because I know y'all love that kind of thing.
Happy Lab hunting!
~CMJ
April Monthly Memento, flood
Admin CavemanJoe – 2024-04-16 14:00:11 [Permalink]
Hey folks, April's Monthly Memento is the April Bool, it gives you +1 Defence all day long.
I got the Improbability-Drive-On-The-Map project just about ready to release, and then we had record-breaking heavy rain and a basement flood. And then I spent a couple of days cleaning that all up and sat down at my computer and said "Right, where was I," and the sky said "Ohohoh, my friend, that was merely the overture," because that's how the sky talks, so we had record-breaking flooding again, breaking the record harder this time, and a much much worse basement flood, bad enough that I was constructing emergency dams out of leftover laminate flooring cutoffs.
So yeah, Island work has been kind of on hold for the past couple of weeks while I sort out all this water. I've got a few new flood mitigation measures installed, and hopefully work will continue and the much-hyped (by me) drive-on-the-map endgame improvements will be with us in late April.
Have fun and stay dry,
~CMJ
April's Monthly Memento will be late
Admin CavemanJoe – 2024-04-01 15:08:37 [Permalink]
Hey folks, April's MM will be a day or two late. Longer MotD incoming, watch this space.
Have fun!
~CMJ
February's Monthly Memento
Admin CavemanJoe – 2024-02-28 15:09:26 [Permalink]
Hey folks, I've been so up to my arse in HOUSE SHIT (see previous MotD for the absolute tip of the iceberg) that I didn't post an MotD about the February Monthly Memento, and thank fuck it's a leap year so I've got an extra day to tell you about the largest and most romantic thing in the game.
The culinary aficionados who have eaten at the Cyber City 404 restaurant "FAMILY FUN FOOD WACKY FAKTORY" will already be familiar with the Romantic Spherical Fun Foods and Romantic Fun Pile, but were you aware that for the month of February you can get the extra-romantic takeaway version? Well you can! In purely data terms, this is the largest Monthly Memento the Island has ever seen, weighing in at over nine hundred kilobytes, because it has to squeeze in a shittily-compressed MP3 of Pachebel's Canon. Even more to love!
Your Valentine's Day candy may well be stale by now, but don't worry, Produkt-10 has a seventy-year shelf life - and when it finally does expire, it tastes exactly the same as when it was fresh. Leap years were invented so that I would have a whole extra glorious day to sell you this wonderful slop.
Have fun!
~CMJ
Welcome hackers, outage, foundation funddrive
Admin CavemanJoe – 2024-01-30 15:13:55 [Permalink]
Hello and welcome, everyone from Hacker News and all the other websites that have been banging on about my enormous CoC since last Thursday.
As a brief explainer to Improbable Island and its current state, imagine you're throwing a party, and it's the best party ever, and you started it in your twenties and now you're 41 and you've had to create extensions on your house to hold All These People, and one day you look behind yourself and remember that you ripped the floor up to create another swimming pool and then got distracted because somebody asked you for a balcony. Suddenly an extra couple of thousand people show up from out of nowhere and start falling through the holes, and the various possums and raccoons that inhabit this particular floor of your house go "What holes?" because they've been there for so long that nobody notices them anymore. Welcome. If you come up out of the lobby and poke around a bit, you might find some places that look like they've at least had a new coat of paint and a minor dusting since computers had a TURBO button.
Yes, do come in, I know this pipe is gushing right now, I thought it'd be quiet for a month or so, just ignore it, I'll have it patched up in a jiffy. You've joined the party just after we've completed a server migration which involved skipping three major PHP versions like a gazelle leaping gracefully over the Grand Canyon and making a perfect ten-point landing only to smash face-first into a schoolbus full of porridge. I hope you love it here, at least once I've tidied up a bit. Welcome, and I'm sorry.
We had a minor server outage Friday night/Saturday morning, and it's my fault, because when my mate texted me to say "Wow you made the front page of Hacker News, hope your box doesn't melt!" and my box had not yet melted, I just couldn't resist replying with my best Posh Horsey Laugh, "Ahwahwahwa, euxgh dahling, hai've been optimizing the absolute bollocks off this game since it ran on spinning rust, Improbable Island hasn't even noticed a little blip like Hacker News, ahohohoho." Sure enough, that very night, around 3am, after serving twenty times our usual traffic for over 24 hours without so much as a sneeze, a whole different server belonging to some other bastard blew its PSU and popped the rack fuse, and down we went like a sack of spuds. Nobody will ever believe me, and that's fine. I guess.
Speaking of stuff falling down unexpectedly, I need some foundation repairs and they're gonna be bloody expensive. It's a long, long story, and you might have seen me talking about it a little at a time in Banter, gently probing around the edges of the subject like your tongue might squirm at a cavity you're trying to ignore, but the short of it is that I live in a house on a hill, the hill is trying its hardest not to be a hill anymore, we gotta jack up the whole front of the house, nine grand kthx.
I got the quote in mid-December after noticing a big crack where I put up my Christmas tree; it's taken me this long to just, like... parse the idea of nine thousand fucking dollars and what to even do about that. Previous fundraisers have been stuff like, oh I need some new tyres, I bet if I ask a few thousand people on the Island I can have that sorted out in a day, or we wanna pay for a whole year of hosting up front because that'll save us a few hundred quid, stuff that seemed big at the time but they're dwarfed in the shadow of this nine fucking thousand dollars.
So I've gotta think of something big and impressive to promise you lot in exchange for this fund drive, but it's gotta be bigger and more impressive than anything I've ever done, and I've gotta think of it while trying not to think about the whole front of my house falling off. So I haven't thought of anything yet, so I guess I'll start the Actual Fund Drive in February with some kind of bonus Monthly Memento or something, consider this advance warning.
Have fun!
~CMJ
Real quick WIP update
Admin CavemanJoe – 2024-01-23 17:06:49 [Permalink]
Hey folks, I've been a bit quiet the last couple of weeks and wanted to stick my head in and let you know what I'm working on at the moment; endgame improvements!
Basically we're taking the Drive out of the Jungle and putting it in a lab on the map. There'll be six labs that don't have the Drive in, and one that does. In a previous update I talked about rewriting the Stamina system for this, but after some fiddling it became clear that it made more sense to do the drive-on-the-map project first.
Like every project, it's become more complex than I'd initially figured; I've got to make all sorts of decisions about what will be in each lab, how best to give clues about where the labs are and which one has the Drive in it, whether the labs should be in the same place for everyone or whether every player will have to find their own labs.
It's a lovely ball of complexity! Just to give you an example, on the local-versus-global information question.
Having lab locations set globally will encourage you lot to chat with each other and keep an eye out on where the labs are and what's in each one, which is great from a social standpoint - but having the lab locations set on a per-player basis makes their discovery more of an explorey-bribey-determiney game element and less of a just ask banter element. If we're to blend the two together, have some labs in the same place for everyone and others in different places for everyone, then that raises more questions: which labs need to stay in the same location for everyone, and which need to be in different places for each player? Should the contents of any given lab be set locally or globally? Should the labs move around, so the information-sharing happens on an ongoing basis? When, and how? Which brings us to figuring out an algorithm to ensure that we never end up with a lab right next to or on top of another lab, and that they're spaced out in satisfying but only semi-predictable ways, which was an interesting morning in itself.
Anyway, the drive labs feature is, I reckon, probably about 60% complete; the labs move around on an irregular basis, there's a hidden mechanism to determine which are in the same place for everyone and which you'll have to hunt for, there are semi-random outcomes to things like what's in that locker or what will that sandwich do to you, the next part of the work will be rejiggering Headphones Jones in the Comms Tent so that he can give you hints that are just hinty enough to be fun.
I've been moving at a pretty good clip so this should be done probably early to mid February. I just wanted to pop on and tell y'all that I'm still alive and working on stuff. :)
Have fun!
~CMJ
January Monthly Memento, cookies
Admin CavemanJoe – 2024-01-14 20:56:00 [Permalink]
Hey all, you know what the January Monthly Memento is, it's the calendar again. Use it once a week to get a new game day.
Nerv is now SEVEN YEARS OLD OH MY GOD WHERE DOES THE TIME GO, and she's selling Girl Scout cookies! Players in the USA can buy them at Nerv's online cookie shop. Please choose the shipping option, as we're not driving littleun all around the country for the sake of six bucks.
Have fun!
~CMJ
