Progress Report 2023.05.01: Where Are We At?

Hi friends,

Happy May! To start things off, I wanted to apologize for how long it’s taking for this alpha update to come out. Estimations remain really hard to do, and, at the end of the day, there’s +350k words of content to code which is a lot of content. I’ve made very good progress, but it’s hard not to be frustrated at how slow things are going as I know how long you’ve been waiting. Episode 2 released on the alpha build in May last year. It wasn’t my intention to take a whole year between episodes (and not even complete ones at that – there’s still the rest of Part 1 to go, and Parts 2 and 3 to complete). But I have been in varying stages of burnt out since September, and trying to strike that balance between progression and not burning myself out more is very difficult.

This is where the update currently stands:

✅ Fixed all reported bugs and rebalanced Aeran’s approval and romance flags in preparation for the next public build patch (the patch hasn’t been added to the game yet, so you WILL be required to replay when the update comes out)
✅ All of Aeran’s Episode 3 Part 1 branches are coded and complete
✅ 1 / 2 of Veyer’s Episode 3 Part 1 branches is coded

This is what I have left to do:

❌ Finish coding the second Veyer branch
❌ Test the new content and do some additional fixes
❌ Release the update for the playtesters
❌ Playtest the update
❌ Release the Episode 3 update on the alpha build
❌ Release the patch (bug fixes and approval rebalance) to the public build

I am not going to attempt to estimate when the update will be ready as estimations tend to add more pressure and make me more stressed about getting the update out on time. If you’re interested in sporadic updates about how the coding process is going, I share those details in the #alpha-general channel of my Patreon’s Discord server!

As always, thank you all so much for your support. 💕