Mar 2023: Thatcher and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Year

Hey folks, Whale here,

To get the obvious out of the way, it's end of March. Sorry for missing a devlog—I sincerely thought I'd posted one until one of our readers asked where it was. My bad. I intend to write these monthly logs whether or not we have anything new to report.

The other obvious thing: we're two months behind schedule and not likely to release for at least another. It's not that we're lazing about; we've both not had more than a couple hours a week since January. It's been a really fucking shitty year. I don't feel obligated to overshare all the bullshit going on right now, but to give you a taste: I've seen the dentist five times year to date, and have at least two more rounds scheduled. Ugh.

Back in January I said we were 80% complete, inadvertently invoking the old adage that the last 20% of effort takes just as long as the first 80%. It was stupid of me to tempt fate like that. To refresh your memory, here's where we stand on scenes to be done as of the last log:

• Tim's Beltane romance—the scene as written in the first draft turned out to be unsatisfying. I'm drafting another.
• Marcus' Beltane romance—done.
• [REDACTED]'s Beltane romance—done.
• Some work on backgrounds—about half done.
• Noire's final scene—writing and sprites done.

In addition, we ran into an implementation problem with Alma's last scene in this build. Dan stepped up and offered to do some additional sprite work to make the scene feasible, but in addition to that I still have to write two versions of the scene and implement everything.

Since excrement started hitting the impeller, I haven't made any progress on the Build 4 script. It's still about a quarter complete. The planned Strokkur sequel has been plotted, more or less, but none of the script is written yet.

So that's where we stand. Dan and I are both committed to seeing this project out to its conclusion—it just might take longer than we would like.