Progress Report - 09/12/2022

Hey fans,

This looks like a puny amount of progress because I don't portray all the setup that goes on before I can work with a scene in my report. I put together all four of the first scenes, so now I just have to render and write. rhon technically has 7 characters in it at once, 4 of which I had to create. It's just been a lot of putting sets together this last week.

I did have a mental breakdown on Wednesday, and that lasted through Thursday. Surprisingly, not due to the chaos of the last release. Although I do want to talk about the last release later in this report.

I'm still struggling with the fact that Steam banned A Petal Among Thorns from their platform. It's not one thing about this that has me feeling defeated. It's the loss of control in the situation, it's the thousands of dollars I could have spent on an assistant to get updates out faster, it's watching all my fellow developers find incredible success while I feel shunned by the community for trying to implement something appalling. So many negative feelings swirling around causing a storm of anger and sadness inside me. 

I have mostly crawled by way out of that hole, and I'm now getting back to neutral. However, I do have a pre-op appointment tomorrow and then next week I have a medical procedure. I'm not sure what the recovery time is going to be, but it's a simple procedure. I should be back to work within a day or two. It'll be a slow month, but we'll pick up momentum moving into October. 

Rose will be asleep for the first three scenes. She stayed up late.

If you haven't played the last release, there will be spoilers for it again. Stop here if you don't want to have the episode spoiled for yourself.

With the response to the knee-jerk changes I made to the last release being overwhelmingly in favor of the original storyline, I've thought about adding in two separate paths to the story. An Artificial Gene path, and a Natural Gene path. This would still upset some people, but it's a good middle ground. It would also allow both conversations to take place so we could still have some interesting conversations between Chester and the girls. Let me know if you would like to see this addition in the next release. If would be very little extra work.

These Progress Reports are turning into blogs about my feelings. I'm like a thirteen year old girl with a diary. Jeesh.

Thank you for all your support, and farewell for now.