So what's happening?

Hey gang, been a minute since I wrote one of these so bear with me. Some of you may noticed awhile back we put a note at the top of our itch page that we'd like to be pushing updates again come August. Well, August is here, and let me tell you... we're not quite ready yet.

Okay okay, not what you want to hear but let me give some background. About a year ago now, Melo our programmer had to unfortunately step down from PsyCon which led us to being put in a hiatus, for a plethora of reasons, but the biggest one being that I didn't have enough familiarity with Ren'py or the Python Programming Language to operate our character sprites, the images you see in a majority of the scenes not dictated by a special cinematic graphic. This problem was exasperated even more so because he left half-way through a re-haul of how we were implementing these sprites.

Let me be clear, I don't blame Melo, he had valid reasons for needing to step back, life happens, we all know it happens and I put a pause on our Patreon and everything else until I could figure out a solution.

That solution came a few months later in the form of Wattson who, admittedly, is a very busy programmer, he works on a large number of Furry Visual Novels, so his availability is a bit limited. However, he had the capabilities, and over this past year he's finalized our new UI, implemented several sub-menus, and more importantly finished our sprite overhaul.

So, in THEORY we should be good to go right? All set to push builds? Well... not quite. I'm still learning how to use our new naming conventions and apply them to the script. (Melo was the one who previously implemented expressions in the scenes) and we can't push our new build until we do, because part of this overhaul meant that none of our previous sprite-declarations would continue working, which means I need to annotate every expression all over again for every scene. In the meanwhile Shiuk has been working on finishing all of our sprite designs. They aren't finalized yet but at the very least our planned cast has all of their first drafts done (well except for one of the character's who only has a reference picture):

Also while on Hiatus, I rewrote much of the PsyCon prologue script, more accurately I reorganized a lot of the events and expanded upon scenes to form a better narrative flow. As we speak I've been finalizing these changes and pushing them intermittently to my proofreaders. (Admittedly I should've had this done already, and that's on me, I've just been struggling to look at scenes and say with certainty that it's where I want it to be, but doing those changes now is easier than it will be further down the line.)

Additionally, when the first build is done, and we've gotten it tested, it won't be posted here on itch initially, but to our Patreon. The reason for that being that I failed to deliver a build one month, 0.8 was on schedule for release it just needed to be programmed into the game, the script was edited, and we got about 20% of the scene-work done before Melo's issues came to a head. So I owe them a build before anything else.

Lastly, I'd like to get ahead on builds before I start releasing again, that way if there is some sort of issue that arises, I can get a head start. So once the build is done I'm going to keep a short pause and develop a small backlog, and once I have that backlog I'll begin pushing builds to itch.io again. Now I'm not positive when that will be, but I am pushing myself to make sure that happens this year, because I know you all are itching to see all the lads again as much as I'm itching to share them.

Again, I apologize for the wall of text, I know you guys are probably not happy, but I hope you all are willing to continue holding out knowing that we've not put a stop to this and we'll keep pushing until the end.