Posted July 26, 2023 by Rook
Greetings Friends,
It's been a while, hasn't it. I have a lot to discuss, and I'm not too sure of where to begin.
To start off, I'm going to apologize for the past two years of hiatus. I'll admit, when we initially began this hiatus, I never expected it to last as long as it has. While it hasn't all been my fault, I know that it's taken as long as it has, in part, due to my lack of proactivity on making the hiatus end. I've had other things in my life taking priority, my job, my education, and while I've definitely put in many hours getting us out of hiatus, it hasn't been enough, and I know it hasn't been as much as I could have. I need to do better, and intend to do so but I still needed to acknowledge my own part in the hiatus.
Now, you may be wondering. What all have I been doing? Why did the hiatus start, and why is it still going? When is it finally ending?
I'll start with the why did it start. Approximately 2 years ago, there was a bit of an unfortunate falling out with our Programmer, he had some personal issues which prevented him from further working on the project. However, before this we'd made arrangements to make major changes to our assets. These plans did not change as initially they'd only been meant to step away for a few months, and upon their return the intention was to update our codebase to properly implement this new format for our assets.
To make a long-story short, these few months extended into indefinitely, and I found myself with a bunch of assets I could no longer use, this led to the introduction of a new part-time programmer to help us more or less fix this issue and required us to redo our asset-formatting again.
However, the issues didn't stop there, as I myself did not have a programmer full-time to handle translating my scripts into a workable format in Ren'py. With 0 knowledge on how to properly code, I was downright stuck.
Fast-forward a bit, and delving into the "What I've been doing" I've been taking some classes on Python to remedy my lack of knowledge and equip myself with the tools to handle a lot of the basic-level programming myself, this felt like a necessity to avoid this problem in the future. I'd still not declare myself a very competent programmer, but I'm no where near as lost as I was before.
Throughout this period, I've also gotten assistance on some extra features for Psychic Connections. A proper UI for the game has been implemented, this extends to UI elements for other features, such as a Scene Gallery, a Music Room, and a Sprite Viewing Lounge.
Despite the hiatus, our artists have never stopped work, all of our relevant planned characters now have sprites, all of our CGs are now beautifully shaded, and all of our placeholder BGs have been replaced. (And many of our future BGs have also been finished.)
So you may be wondering, what's left, what's stopping the end of this hiatus? The short-answer, is me.
During the hiatus, I got the brilliant idea to rewrite all of the current existing content.However, I'd be lying if I didn't say I found that to be a struggle. It's not so much that I'm changing the story too much as I am re-arranging much of what's been told, and shifting the way it's portrayed to better match my intended vision. (Whilst adding a few extra scenes here and there.) This period of limbo seemed like the only time where making such a change would be feasible, and while that's true, I underestimated how long making such changes would take, because every change naturally cascades into further changes in the later days of the script.
As it stands, I'm about 65% done with the intended rewrites, for reference, Days 1-3 were initially 43.5K words, and now it's 60K. (That's almost a 50% increase in content.) That isn't counting the changes I've made to the later days that are not yet finalized and thus can't be included in my calculations.
Truthfully, I'd intended to be further along by this point, but naturally life has side-tracked me. My current living-arrangement is coming to a sudden end due to my roommates deciding they no longer wish to continue our current arrangement, which led to me looking for a new place to live. (I did manage to find something that I'm moving into this week.) In addition, this past month there was an unfortunate health-scare in my family that placed my father in the hospital. One surgery and a week of stress later, and he's back home and presumed to live many more years, but all of this was stressful enough that I found myself unable to make the progress I intended to make when I'd previously announced on Twitter that Psychic Connections would be returning this summer.
So now that I've highlighted my failings, what does the path forward look like. Well, I'll be regrettably honest, I don't think I will be making my August release like I'd intended. My initial thought was to say October is the next goal, but I think if I'm being realistic, I want to give myself a wider window for life to get in the way. So while I doubt anyone will be happy to hear this. The new plan is for December to stage the return of Psychic Connections. (This is a soft-plan for the record, we 100% will be releasing this sooner than that if it's ready before then.)
I know that it's farther away than any of us wanted it to be, and I could say I'm sorry, but at this point I don't think I could apologize enough to make up for how long this is taking, so instead I'll simply promise to do better than I was before, and to get this to you all as soon as possible.