HOly crap… it’s happening…
First of v0.8.8 The Grampy P Badge… is LIVE 🎉
I have this tendency to stay up late if the app isn’t playable — making sure it works before I crash. You never know when a person will check your app, and I haven’t even been promoting it or anything, but I would be super let down if someone’s first impression was just an error page.
It’s actually been a standard that has kept me going since the very beginning:
👉 The app is live tested and must always be playable.
I’d even revert to a previous line of code before leaving this thing in disarray. That has always been clear.
I never thought of it that way before, but tonight — after not pulling an all-nighter for a while — I remembered the panic that sets in when I don’t have everything up and running correctly.
🐱 Grampy P Gets Smarter
So what happened?? Well… honestly I covered a lot today and can’t remember it all 🤯.
I haven’t pushed anything to my main yet, but preliminary testing says that I probably could.
I started out the day knowing that Grampy P — Pythagoras Cat, P Cat, my mathematic feline — needed to get smarter. And honestly… he did.
I began with his intro wiring and his greeting, wanting him to feel real.
But then I hit a point — the same one I hit last time building this chatbot brain:
Am I doing too much?
I asked, and Patch (yeah, I think it needs a new name…) didn’t blink.
He said: “Nah, hold my digital slurpee…” 🥤
His idea was good, but I had to stop him. We needed to remember: just throwing code at the walls to see what sticks isn’t smart. We needed to pre-plan.
So after slowing down for a second… we came up with a hybrid chatbot:
✨ predictive responses
✨ teaching moments
✨ ways to navigate when it doesn’t understand you
All very creative ways — ones I’ve toyed with before — to make this chatbot feel natural.
So far, it’s going okay. I’m proud to say that a lesson on fractions and square roots are readily available… along with his favorite quesadilla recipe 🌮🧀.
MathTips was finally feeling on track. But I knew something…
👉 I couldn’t finish Grampy P until the festival is done.
👉 And I can’t finish the festival until he has a brain!!
So with something of a brain intact, I put Grampy P to sleep in his camper 🚌💤 and moved back to the global festival for the first time in mooooonths. (I’ve only been working since May? hmmmm 🤔).
🏅 Badges… Finally
Badges. It was time.
My tiny testers have been asking forever for ways to see the other backgrounds. I had to keep telling them: “You’ll have to wait for the badges to be implemented.”
At first, since I’m not an expert coder, it did not go smoothly. I put the badge triggers in all the wrong places and had to dig myself out of the hole for about an hour.
But then… I never thought I would see it…
Badges!! Working badges!! 🏅✨
- 51%+ completion has finally been opened up to the festival.
- Even the Jukebox got a little more love so I could get its badge active 🎶.
- Story Mode Prologue has a badge.
- Other modes too.
- Backgrounds are unlocking as intended!
This is all very, very cool.
It’s still unpolished right now, but I want to keep working simultaneously on Grampy P in MathTips Village and on the badge/theme system.
As I said, I knew all along they’d be tied together. Probably back in June, when I gave up on having the AI model and realized Grampy P could have a mood and function outside of that cool (but unseen) vision.
Grampy P is really shaping up. The badge system is really shaping up. So I’ve tied their completion to the v0.9.0 goal of having both done ✅.
🚀 Wrapping It Up
I can’t believe we’re almost there.
For Now…
v0.8.8 — The Grampy P Badge! 🎉🐱🏅
JPS Grooves 
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