Improbable Island Message of the Day (MoTD)

New Monthly Memento, embuggerances, catching up, accessibility
Admin CavemanJoe – 2021-07-14 19:27:36 [Permalink]
Update 2021-07-14: I've spent much of today on accessibility features. Bars (such as the health bar, experience bar, nutrition info in restaurants etc) are now made out of divs instead of tables, and have alt text applied to help out our blind players. I've also added some landmarks to the Beta skin (landmarks help a screen reader to jump quickly between sections). While I was in there and thinking about bars I gave them a little cosmetic prettyup for the Beta skin adding a subtle shadow effect, hit CTRL-F5 to see it. I plan to deprecate the text-only "Accessible" skins in the near future to concentrate on making the Beta skin accessible to everyone (it seems daft to have an accessible skin and an inaccessible skin), so if you use a screen reader and can think of things that'd make playing more fun, please let me know. Have fun, original MotD follows.

Hey folks, it's been a long time since the last MotD! Things got really suddenly really crazy here at Improbable Island HQ, for reasons I won't go into... oh heck alright I'll go into one of them, we had a week of BIG BIG RAIN around father's day and shortly afterwards I heard a ponk ponk ponk sound while I was in my basement workshop. It was a pinhole leak in a copper pipe, surrounded by green. "Huh," thinks I, "guess I'd better cut that sucker out and fire up the blowtorch and solder in a new pipe section," and then I discovered all the other new green bits that were weeks or days away from popping. Our best guess is the flooding upset the chemistry of the local water supply just enough to make a complete bollocks of my ancient pipes. To cut a very long story short, this extrapolated out a bit but now it's over. I hope.

Anyways, this meant I made a Monthly Memento for July, tested it to make sure it worked perfectly on my test server, uploaded it to the live server, and then basically didn't log on for a couple of weeks to see it fail perfectly. So I've spent much of this morning chasing down bugs in July's Monthly Memento. I guess at this point I should tell you what that is, and it's the Non-Functional Tulip!

It's a combined piss-take of billionnaires and a nakedly gratuitous bare-faced cash grab.

I had this idea for a Monthly Memento taking the piss out of Non-Fungible Tokens back in late May, but I knew I'd have to do some interesting programming to make it work the way I wanted it to, and I gambled on whether anybody would still care about NFT's in a month's time. That was probably a mistake but I think I just about got away with it, timing-the-zeitgeist-wise.

The Non-Functional Tulip works differently to other Monthly Mementos in several ways. First, you can have more than one; you get another every time you donate a tenner or more. Second, every Non-Functional Tulip is completely unique, having its own serial number and pattern of petals. The more you donate, the more petals your tulip has.

"BUT FOR GOD'S SAKE WHAT DOES IT DO," I hear you cry. Well, the clue's right there in the name, it doesn't do much. This is a piss-take of a weird and appalling thing that rich people do for no reason, after all. You get a minor all-day Stamina buff, and there's a possibility of a Requisition payout bonus. More expensive tulips have a higher chance of adding the Req bonus. That's about it.

"WELL FOR GOD'S SAKE WHAT'S A NON-FUNGIBLE TOKEN," I hear some of you cry, and I envy your innocence. Treasure it.

Anyway, if you donated to get this month's Monthly Memento before today, the 13th of July, then you'll have gotten one that didn't work properly and was not unique - or, in other words, you have a non-functional Non-Functional Tulip. The difference between Non-Functional Tulips minted after the 13th of July and the earlier ones is that the earlier ones are all the same, lacking serial numbers, and not unique at all. To compensate for this disappointment I've given you another tulip, a working and unique one this time, and re-given you the same number of Supporter Points you bought with the first non-functional Non-Functional Tulip. Perversely, there are now more unique Non-Functional Tulips in the game than there are faulty non-functional Non-Functional Tulips, making the faulty ones a rare collector's item akin to a misprinted stamp or a fucked-up coin with an upside-down date code or something. I wonder what will unfold there.

Anyway I'm gonna crack on with some new skin stuff and some accessibility fixes, have fun!

~CMJ

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