Devlog August

Hello everyone,

I wanted to sincerely apologize for the severe lack of content and communication. I had planned to make the next post one with an actual game update, but have continuously run into setback after setback and I don't want to keep you guys guessing and wondering if the project is dead or still in the works. 

TL;DR:

Yes, the game is still being worked on slowly, I have no plans to quit or stop production on the game. Recently over the past year/year and a half I've just run into many many issues regarding the game itself and in life and it has really made it difficult to work on the game and provide a decent amount of content. I am doing my best to work on the game in my limited spare time between my irl job and trying to balance my health, social life, friendships, and the game. I've got about half of the third in game day finished with the Mage, Fighter and Rogue majors with the most content so far. I still am working on Guardian and Holy Arts and then working toward merging the paths for end of Day 3 and all of Day 4. I've also been working on revamping the UI to try to make it look cleaner and more user friendly. I've also been updating the music room and added a Patron section (this may have already been in the game, I honestly don't remember what's new and old at this point).

Full Story:

As you know, the original character artist, Bullstorm, and I are no longer working on the project together so I went searching for a new artist who was interested in working on this project and found Wufric. He started working on the sprites for Silas including the edits with Sials' build and weight. Wu then had some of his own life issues come up and had to take a break from working on this to work on other commissions for a time so new art was paused, but I was still working on the coding and story aspects. 

At the end of December I got covid and my employer told me I was not allowed to work until I heard back from our FMLA team. I didn't hear back from the FMLA team for two weeks so I told my boss that since I had been recovered I was going to start working. When I initially got covid, my employer had a policy that would allow for two weeks of paid time coded as covid leave instead of us using our other PTO options. On January 1, while I was still out after being told I could not work, the policy changed to only allow for 1 week of paid covid leave. Even though I had initially been out during the previous policy, the FMLA team reviewed my case under the new policy and forced me to use all of my sick time for the year to cover for one of the weeks I was out. I have been fighting my employer since then, trying to get my sick time back. Then there were issues with work regarding masks and vaccines and American "mandates" regarding which vaccines were needed in order to keep your job, etc. So there were a bunch of hoops I had to go through in order to provide proper documentation of vaccination status, religious or medical exemptions, etc. 

In March/April I ended up in and out of the hospital and doctors offices for pain and lumps and possible cancer (thankfully it wasn't cancer) so I had a lot going on during that time. This summer, we got swamped with extra work due to not having enough employees for the amount of files we were receiving so we all have had to put in a lot of extra hours of work which had drained me more and I barely had any energy left to work on the game. The OT continues until now, but is at a more manageable level so I've been able to get a bit of work done on the game.

In July/August, my old PC died and broke down and I had to get a new one. During the transfer process, the back ups of the game and assets I had became corrupted and I lost a large chunk of code that I've had to rewrite and fix and update. Thankfully I've been able to get the majority of it back or rewritten now or have a way I can work around some of the lost art assets (original sprite PSD files), but it was still a major setback.

I've been responding to comments and questions on itch, twitter and different discord servers about what's been going on, but I wanted to make an official post detailing why there has been no updates or content. Again I want to sincerely apologize for the fact it's been a year since any game update and I have not had the energy or motivation to keep up to date with you guys as I should have. I also want to thank everyone for still checking in and expressing their interest and patience in waiting for more updates and information.