Sitrep for March

Alright, it's been a while since I felt the need to do one of these, but March is going to be a little different from usual. As such, I figured I'd better put out a note on the subject before the polls (which will likely be up within a day, but still).

First, you all should be aware, since I've mentioned it frequently and often, that the last major thing I'm doing with Left Hand Magic is a New Game+ Route. Said route will unlock after completing the four solo routes (threesome routes being optional), and will allow you to go down a Harem Route where Mira manages to get with all four girls. It's pretty obviously a fan-service route, rather than terribly realistic ;-). It also won't have any real divergence points. It'll be a straight shot down the route.

As for what this has to do with March? I'm most likely going to be starting on that route this month, but not until the Focus Poll is over. The Focus Poll for this month is going to cover an option for some additional content for the main routes, and depending on how that goes, it may end up that I focus on that content this month. Either way though, the build is probably going to be a little smaller than normal.

There's a good reason for that.

Specifically, I'm going to be spending the first 10-12 days of this month hammering as hard as I can on the list of animations that need redone. When I finally did a full accounting of such last month, while prepping the project for the sound improvements I've talked about, I was distressed to realize that there were somewhere around 30 animations that I wanted to tweak. Most of those aren't huge tweaks, but they are the ones I consider 'bad enough I don't want to see them in the final product.'

Now, I managed to eliminate 6 of those in February, which was a minor miracle. But that means I've still got 24 to redo (well, hopefully 23, one of them is already underway). In light of this realization, I'm going to be using the first chunk of the month to take as big a bite out of the list as I possibly can. I'm hoping to knock out around half of them outright, then get the rest in bits and pieces in other builds as I've already been doing. I know, from experiencing this from the player side, that it isn't terribly exciting to see replacements rather than new content.

Unfortunately, it needs to happen.

I'll do my best to still deliver a solid amount of new content this month, the exact type depending on the results of the poll. But there's a good chance it will be one of the smaller builds I've ever made on the new content front. That's regrettable, but there really just isn't another way to handle it as this point. So that's how it's going to be...