Progress and Behind the Scenes Update

Happy Friday, all.

I wanted to give everyone a quick update both in terms of progress on the next update and just life in general.

The artist I hired and I have made some really great progress on the new UI. I've got the main menu, Save, Load and Options/Preferences screens all done, and only minor work needs to be done yet on the About and Help screens. The Gallery and Music rooms are going to be much heavier lifts due to how much more involve the coding is on those screens, and there may be an interim period during which I remove the gallery from distributed builds, as I think I'm going to have to rebuild it from scratch with entirely new code. But, great progress has been made here.

Second, I've been working on the script for the next update. Parts of it are a bit heavy, and I may have to include a trigger warning and am even debating whether to include an ability to skip some of the tougher dialogue. On the other hand, it is not gratuitous; I think it's going to provide some important context which would be missed if it were skipped. Regardless, it has been difficult to write, and I appreciate the patrons who have chipped in with some suggestions over on Discord.

Now, despite all that progress, I'll admit I would like to have been done with the script by this point and starting to get preview renders out to you. Unfortunately, that's not the case. My father-in-law has severe dementia and is beginning to have psychotic episodes. Without getting into all the details, this has required a lot of late night phone calls between my husband and his mom, calls to hospice, etc., and then just me trying to be a good husband and support him as he goes through it. Our son was also diagnosed with strep throat a week ago, prescribed antibiotics that quickly put him on the path to recovery, and then yesterday came down with a severe allergic reaction. On top of all that, I was solo parenting both of the last two weekends as HusBear was traveling out of town, and work has been unusually demanding and beastly.

I am going to bring the laptop out to the cabin this weekend, though, and hopefully with the peace, quiet and perspective should be able to make some significant progress.

Finally, I'm going to be putting out a poll shortly (starting at the higher tiers but gradually releasing to Hunters and then Public) on the appearance of the in-game text box for dialogue and narration. I had a poll over on Discord and have a good sense of where this is going to go (and it's my personal preference, too), but I want to see what fans of the game think.

Anyway, that's enough of a wall of text for now. Have a great weekend, everyone.