Status update + Community Recolor 2 winners

Hey everyone. So, this update is obviously extremely late - even moreso than my usual lateness - and I'm really sorry about that. The past few weeks have been.. rough, to say the least. The leg pain continues unabated, and the experience of being in pain every day, almost all day, has triggered a really bad depression flareup. A lot of days it's been difficult to just get out of bed, let alone get anything productive done.

It's not all bad - in the absence of work productivity, I've been trying really hard to work on myself. We started seeing our dietician again and I'm back to losing weight; I saw my therapist again for the first time in like 4+ months (I'll get into that later); and I had my doctor's appointment to get my knee checked out, which had both good and bad news - which seemed bad at first but turned out to be mostly good, though it's been really hard to focus on the good things over the bad.

I'll go into detail about all of the personal stuff near the end of the post. First, I'll go over the stuff I do have to talk about work-wise, starting with all of the daily updates since the last time I posted them (which are almost exclusively updates from Orex, who has been keeping at it despite my own failings, so a big thank you to him for being a great friend and dev partner).

The one good thing I did was getting the intro cutscene fully watchable. It's still using mostly WIP assets, but I've done a solid amount of polish work already, especially on the audio front, and I'm really happy with how it's turning out! It's way more cinematic than anything currently in the game, and I can't wait to show it off. I might try and record a video of the current version soon, despite the WIP/placeholder assets, so you all can get an idea of what it'll be like.

The last work-related thing to talk about is the community recolor poll, which is now officially over! Without further ado, here are your final winners:

Since this is a SFW post I can't actually post the images of the last poll's winners, but as the image says, the winners were B, A, and C (all of which were the same between Discord/Patreon for once), and you can look back at the last post to check out what the winning underwear colors looked like. I hope you enjoyed this round, it's always a lot of fun to do! We'll probably take a break for a little bit before starting another one, but maybe next time we'll do only non-human skin colors?

In any case, that's everything work-related I have to talk about today, so on to the personal stuff. I'll start with the most immediately relevant one, the leg/knee pain.

So I had my doctor's appointment, and like I said, there's good and bad news. More good than bad, thankfully, although it seemed like the opposite at first. For a bit of context, I don't think I've ever talked about this on Patreon before, but I have a pretty severe case of psoriasis that affects most of my body at least a little bit, but it's especially bad on my legs. The last time I got it checked out, there weren't a ton of treatment options, and most of them were those big scary medications that can have serious effects on your immune system and general health/life, all while costing tens of thousands of dollars a year, so at the time I didn't end up getting any long-term treatment. Because of that, it's been steadily getting worse and worse, and my doctor's initial reaction was that my knee problems were most likely caused by psoriatic arthritis. If that was the case, the only real options for treatment would be the aforementioned big scary meds, and not only is that idea terrifying to me, but unless my health insurance was willing to cover them in their entirety - which they definitely wouldn't, those assholes seem to get off on denying us medications lately - there's no way in hell I'd be able to afford them.

All that said, though, the psoriatic arthritis was just her initial impression, but to make sure we also did an xray. The GOOD news is that, as far as we can tell, the xray doesn't seem to show psoriatic arthritis (at least not yet), and instead seems to be Runner's Knee, which - despite the name - is a common condition for people like me who don't exercise much. Treatment is pretty straightforward and simple, mostly involving careful exercise/stretching/rest/ice, which she gave me some advice and directions on, so I'm going to be trying to stick to a treatment plan pretty stringently. If that doesn't work, she recommended I see a physical therapist for more direct help, so with any luck I should be able to get this under control eventually. She also gave me a referral to a dermatologist, so I'll be going to see someone for my psoriasis again soon. Apparently there have been a lot of new treatments coming out in the last few years, so fingers crossed there will be an option that's not as terrifying - or at least one that won't bankrupt me.

Aside from the knee stuff, there's also the dieting and therapy. I don't have much to say about the diet - it's going really well so far, and I managed to almost maintain my weight loss since we stopped seeing them, so I only lost a tiny bit of progress. As for the therapy though, I don't want to get super deep into everything that's going on in my head right now (I'd be here all day), but the big reason for the huge gap is that I was soft-diagnosed with agoraphobia. The symptoms got a LOT worse when I had to stop taking my anti-anxiety medication recently, which has made it really fuckin' hard to schedule and show up for appointments. I haven't seen a specialist or anything to get an official diagnosis, but my therapist is pretty confident in it, and it certainly fits the behavioral patterns I've had for.. well, my whole life. I've been trying to force myself out of the house more often to try and confront the problem, and hopefully exposure therapy myself into being a bit more stable. It's helping, but it's definitely a slow process.

All that to say, going to therapy has been really difficult, and I had to call out of sessions multiple times because I just couldn't get the anxiety under control (and before you ask, telehealth doesn't help, if anything my phone anxiety is way worse). They've been incredibly kind and accommodating about it, though - they're the best healthcare team I've ever had and I really can't thank them enough. I finally managed to get myself to go to a session earlier this week, and thankfully, it went really well. With how bad my mental health has been lately, we're trying to do some more intensive/high-effort treatments than we were doing before, so fingers crossed they'll be able to make a difference.

Well, I think that's finally everything I had to talk about today. Again, I'm really sorry that productivity has been such a shitshow from me this year. At the very least, since I'm struggling so much with work when I can't sit at my desk, I'm trying really hard to work on myself and improve the other parts of my life, so I can have less personal issues to deal with once my leg pain is under control. In the short term, I'm going to create a work schedule that I can do with Puffernutter (who has also been struggling with productivity on her own stuff), so I'm hopeful that we'll see some improvements even before my leg is feeling better.

Alright, I could keep going but I think that's enough rambling from me for today. Thank you all so much for reading - and for giving me the space and support to try and work on all of this stuff. I feel so bad for how long this game has taken to develop, but more than that, I'm so incredibly grateful to all of you. You're truly the best community I could have asked for, so from the bottom of my heart, thank you all. We'll see you again next week with another update, and with any luck it'll be a more work-focused one!