Sitrep for July

Alright, folks, this is more of a situation report than a progress report for a couple of reasons. First, of course, is that the polls are still ongoing. Second, however is because of the reason things were delayed at the end of the last build.

Bluntly put, I crashed hard after 6+ months of pushing myself beyond sane working limits trying to get Left Hand Magic done on my original self-imposed deadline. Which, much to my frustration, would have been the game being totally done new content wise this month, with next month only being for refinement and release. Obviously, despite how hard I pushed? I'm going to need more time than that.

The extreme aggravation of that, added to some medical issues adding to the stress, and then also finding out that the Sound Guy whose been working on improving the game sound for me had a hardware failure causing the loss of all the work he'd done so far? (He had, in fact, nearly finished doing sound for both all the animations along Trix and Talia's entire routes). All of that hit in rapid succession and I hit a point where I just flat couldn't keep going for a few days, which pushed the game to be delayed three days into July in turn.

Unfortunately, I'm still not exactly in a good physical or mental place at the moment. I desperately need to dial it back a bit this month, to allow myself to breath, even if the idea of doing so sort of gives me panic attacks all on it's own. I've been working out exactly how to strike a balance of making enough progress not to panic over the lack of progress, while also not slowly killing myself from overwork and stress. The result I've settled on for July is as follows:

This month, my first focus is going to be on completing the remaining animations that need redone. I've already been working on this, having redone an additional two animations while I was working this all out. As it happens? That means there are only three such animations redos left. Those animations need to get redone sooner or later, and they are honestly fairly low-stress for me to work on. Better yet, by being able to just flat out check that box off, I'll be able to spend more time in future updates on the new content. I've been spending 3-4 days at the start of every month working on redoing animations since, like, December of last year.

The downside to this approach, in addition to me forcing myself to stick to a slightly less intense schedule, is that the New Content for the month will be a bit less than the last couple of updates. There will still be new content. At the absolute minimum, I expect to be able to finish Harem Route Week 4 and get the previous Gallery content I skipped put in. But I'm not commixing to anything beyond that just yet. Not between the late start and me trying to take it easier.

If things go well, than there might be another day or two beyond that of new content pushing into Week 5. But I'm not going to stress over it (or, well, I'm going to try to not stress over it). By getting more of the re-do content completely crossed off, possibly even starting on fixing some of the early-game stills as well, I'll be setting future builds up to be larger on the new content side anyway. As is, I'm honestly hoping that my new deadline for release, which I'm putting as hopefully October currently, holds up -_-. I'm hoping to finish all new content by the end of September, with October only being final polish and the actual Steam release.

Note, all other rewards should be unaffected. In fact, with me easing off on grinding at Left Hand Magic so hard, they will likely be easier to work into the schedule.