2022 Development Plan

TL;DR

• I will resume my development of VTSOM.
• I will begin my development of Chapter 5. However, I will also be revamping Chapters 1-4 because I am unhappy with the current implementation. I am also migrating the game to a newer version of the engine. I envision that the revamping itself will take several months, and the development of the new chapter will take more than a year.
• I plan to try out working in private and will be prioritizing my life outside of game dev in 2022. Nonetheless, I will still provide updates and try my best to keep everyone in the loop.
• In the future, I want to work on games at a pace that does not adversely affect my life outside it. I shot myself in the foot by cranking out Chapter 3 at such a fast speed that players began to underestimate the workload and believe that 8 months for Chapter 4 is unreasonable. The truth is, I gave up a lot of things to pump out Chapter 4 as fast as possible. I don’t blame anyone but myself, but it is time I make clear that this expectation is unrealistic.
• I am opening a Ko-fi page to further support my development: https://ko-fi.com/dino999z 

Hello everyone, happy holidays! Before my new announcements, I’d like to take a moment to thank everyone who has supported me by donating or purchasing the VTSOM Art Pack and OSTs. I would also like to thank everyone who has been extremely understanding and helped me take down unauthorized reuploads of my art and games. Coming back to what I want to talk about today, I am very happy to announce that I will be resuming my development of “Vincent: The Secret of Myers.”

Currently, I am in the pre-development stage trying to figure out what I’d like to do in Chapter 5. I am also revamping Chapters 1-4 and migrating them to a newer version of the engine, which is a process that I have already begun. I plan to revisit every single chapter released so far and address everything I don’t like about them, which will involve heavy code restructure, feature addition, art polish, and more. This is an intense process and will take several months; I will be constantly breaking the game and fixing it while simultaneously making it better. I am aware that players are probably only interested in the upcoming Chapters 5-6 rather than an improved version of Chapters 1-4, but I am very unhappy with how a lot of the things are executed in the current chapters. I focused too much on pumping out new content under stress that I rushed through a lot of the implementations, only thinking about getting things to work rather than how. This is something I would like to do for myself, and although it doesn’t really matter to others since it is mostly about how things work “underneath,” I believe it will strongly benefit the future development, and more importantly, I don’t want to make the same mistake of releasing a rushed game when I clearly know I could do better. In short, I believe it is time to go back to focusing on what I really want to do for the game, rather than constantly worrying about not releasing the game “fast enough.” 

Additionally, I would also like to try out working in private. There will still be updates and I will try my best to keep everyone in the loop, but I won’t be providing updates as frequently. The main reason behind this decision is that I have a full life outside of game dev, yet I have wrongly prioritized game dev over things that were clearly more important to me in the past. I love game dev and don’t exactly regret doing that, but prioritizing it over everything else is not the wisest thing for me to keep doing, especially when I am having a difficult time even recovering the development cost of Chapters 1-4. I want to break the vicious cycle of constantly pushing myself to release the chapters as fast as possible, as it had not only adversely affected my life outside it, but had also led to unrealistic expectations coming from players expecting me to release new chapters in a shorter and shorter amount of time. I hope you understand where I am coming from and why I am making this decision, and I thank you in advance for your understanding.

Lastly, I hope I don’t come across as being a little upset in this announcement. I am in fact very excited to get back to the development of VTSOM (I also had a lot of fun making art for the art pack!). Ideally, I want to mix things up a little by switching back and forth from working on Chapter 5 and revamping Chapters 1-4, but it is highly likely that I will work on revamping first, since future chapters will depend on the implementations in previous chapters. If I have time, I also want to work on more art for the VTSOM art pack. Depending on how things work out, I may either release the revamped Chapters 1-4 first, or both the revamped version and Chapter 5 together as a single update. Admittingly, the amount of time I have for game dev depends strongly on my life outside it, and I have been a lot busier than before. Despite that, I still plan to work on it daily. I envision that the revamping itself will take several months, and the development of the new chapter will take longer than a year. If you would like to aid me with my development, you can buy me a cup of coffee on Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/dino999z . Alternatively, you can also support me by purchasing the VTSOM Art Pack and Soundtracks. Thank you again for your support, and I look forward to bringing you more VTSOM content in 2022!

- Dino