Development Update May 2024

Enough doomposting, here's some realismposting.

First up, sorry for going AWOL for the past week. I needed it, really needed it. I have been suffering from bouts of low mood pretty much since the honeymoon period of my last release ended, and just over a week ago it got about as low as it could've. I considered doing a little writeup going in depth about my personal situation, but no, I've decided to simply allude to it instead, publicly yelling into the void is one of the last things I want to do, and it's one of the things I was doing recently in a smaller scale, which is one of the things that forced me to step back and re-evaluate my current emotions.

So that's that for now, apologies to anyone who was worried about me or otherwise upset with my recently worsening behavior.

Now, about the game. Despite taking a week off, I was actually working on the game still, writing only, but working nonetheless. I had to seriously deep dive into how I approach work on Realm Invader, if my last update didn't spell it out for you, I was extremely unimpressed with my productivity. I've tried a different approach and the results have been much more pleasant, it's also helping me come to terms with work-life balance, making it appear less despair-inducing.

I don't keep a record of my progress, the last thing I can find is me saying I had about 7k words on 03/05 (This is in DD/MM format btw, I'm not a monster). I know for a fact that I didn't do any work on the 15th, 18th, and 19th, and right now the update has 15k words, which means a steady rate of progress. Considering it took about 2 weeks to write 4.5k words last month, and 8 more days to hit the aforementioned 7k words. That's over 3 weeks to write 7k words. I've over doubled that in 8 days. This is an extremely positive trend that is helping to reassure me and hopefully is good news for you too. Hypothetically (this would never happen), if I kept up that pace non-stop, I could've written Ep 2 Pt 1 in less than 2 months. There are always off-days and intermittent rendering to throw in there, but you get the point, it's a good speed. At least compared to before.

Tomorrow I'm going to start rendering again. I don't know if that's going to be any faster, but here's hoping. Unfortunately, animations are still a thing, while I usually have a 40 render-per-day target, there's no way I can achieve that alongside any kind of complex animation. I haven't got such a high density of animations this time around, however. I have about 550 displayables planned, and while I haven't counted, only about 5-6 of those are animations. Most complex animations for now will be lewd scenes, which I'm inching towards writing, but not quite there yet.

There you have it. I improvise these updates, so I'm sure that I'm forgetting to tell you something important. Regardless, this is a positive update. I've cleared my head a little bit, I'm working faster, and I'm ready to show my face to the world again. I don't have an ETA yet, I have internal guesses but I don't like announcing them publicly as they tend to be wildly inaccurate.

See you guys when I'm ready to dump more previews.

- Gary