Saturday Devlog (June 12)

Hello everyone, and happy Saturday once again! Hope your weekend is going well :D

I come bearing a bit of bad news today, namely that I've hit a pretty significant roadblock in writing content for AMR. There are numerous contributing factors to this that I'll discuss at length over the course of this devlog, but ultimately it culminates in the following couple of points:

- I've been really unhappy with the quality of writing that I've been churning out for the past week or so, and I do not believe it is up to par with the rest of the released demo. As such, I am delaying the release of Demo 5.0 for July, so that I can appropriately explore the underlying causes of this quality drop and subsequently solve them.

- I am suspending Patreon payments until the month after Demo 5.0 is properly released. At this time, I am optimistic that it can launch sometime in July, and thus Patreon will resume charging in August. If this changes, I will make notifications via the Patreon feed far ahead of time.

I apologize really deeply for the inconvenience. This was not a decision that I took lightly, and I would not have considered it if it was in any way avoidable. However, I think allowing content with significantly compromised quality to make it to the update is a disservice to both patrons and the game itself. As such, I believe a delay would be the best course of action for the game's development.

Why the struggle?

I alluded to there being several contributing factors as to why I'm struggling to get this update up and running, which I'll now try to go over one by one.

1. Adjusting to multitasking

This is something that I've talked about on tumblr, way back when the project first started: AMR as a concept is over half a decade old. I've been nursing the plot and characters in my head since high school, and over the course of five years I've been able to refine it into detailed plot beats and concepts. As such, when I write an update I do nothing but write the update. Storyboarding and such is kept to a relative minimum because I have it already--it's just about making sure it slots itself nicely with things like choice branches and the stat system.

What's different about this update is that I had no storyboard at the outset. It's a completely new arc that has only started to manifest sometime in the past two months. For the first time since the game properly began development, I feel like I'm driving through a rainstorm with one headlight on, with no fully developed plot beats to hang onto as I write the arc. And it shows in the writing. The pacing is sluggish, the new characters don't feel like they have fully developed personalities, and the core aspect of the next update--a whodunnit segment--is set up poorly.

Even at a glance I could tell that either significant rewrites or even a full scrap is necessary to make the arc stand toe-to-toe with the rest of the project. This is an act that I intend to see through, but I will need time to properly execute it. The storyboard must be worked on separately from the update's actual writing; and because it is a process that heavily relies on factors like inspiration, it is not something that I am able to rush.

2. Plain, simple burnout

When AMR's initial demo was published back in Mid-February, it clocked in at just under 50k words. Over the course of the next three and a half months--culminating  in Demo 4.0 released at the end of May--this number would triple, resulting in the 150k-word behemoth you see today. And for every 20-25k words that eventually make it onto the update, another 10-20k written and then were left on the drawing board. Balancing this with things like schoolwork and irl issues have left me more drained than I'd realized, and the consequences of this has only begun to hit me full force this month. Every sentence is a battle, and even after multiple revisions and rewords, they never come out quite right.

In the earliest days of development, I would be able to write almost without thinking. Words flowed like water, and all it took were a couple of edits for the scenes to achieve the effect I wanted. From consulting with other authors, it is very likely that this shift is the result of burnout from having worked on the project so intensely for so long. I am hopeful that a couple of weeks' reprieve from the project would allow me to return refreshed and ready to produce work that is deserving of your support.

3. The need for a fresh perspective

As a novice writer working on my debut project, I have no real creative writing basics to speak of. Much of my writing know-how is acquired through reading the works of others and decoding what made their prose and narratives effective. I would then try to incorporate elements of this into my own work, and this is how segments like the flashbacks, POV changes, and the exoneration scene first came into being.

Since beginning work on AMR, I have been left with almost no time to repeat this process, and increasingly I feel like my work has become rote and formulaic due to the limited base I'm able to draw from. Over the next couple of weeks, I intend to consume literature wholly unrelated to AMR so that I can figure out what makes them tick--and how I can replicate their most resounding successes in my own work. I am hopeful that this will lead to an overall increase in quality as well as a freshness to the next update that breaks away from AMR's general narrative formula.

Again, my sincerest apologies for the unpleasant news. I will do my very best to deliver an update that will live up to your expectations. And as always, thank you for supporting the development of A Mage Reborn!