Fortnightly Progress - 28th July

Yes, there should have absolutely been one of these at the start of this month. I basically get into one of those annoying mental loops where I felt like I was so close to getting the long awaited next No Haven update out, but as I got closer it then kept getting further away as I found more stuff that had to be done, and wanted to get it right as I knew it had been too long.

Accentuating the positive I did at last comprehensively shatter the mental block that was preventing me making any progress with NH so woo an update did in fact actually happen.

Kind of darkly amusing in a 'well, that's a thing' sort of way that I finally get my head back together, as everything else appears to be falling apart. Please keep an eye on the twitter and bluesky just in case, and I'm also going to start as of this one, posting the text of these Fortnightly posts elsewhere as well.

Right so the update which came out yesterday for the Discord tiers and above. Highlight is most definitely that I got the Encampment Roles working. That was painful to put it lightly. There also a fair bit of other stuff like an overhaul of some of the starting placeholder portraits and the re-implementation of Aversol Markets complete with a new findable Unique. WIll post the full patch notes on the twitter, bluesky, and tumblr so you can check those out.

Posted it and despite testing it pretty solidly all this month I promptly got an absolute deluge of bug reports on my discord. So plan is give it a couple of days to pick up some more obvious things, and then a hotfix at end of the week. Then there will be the TF Edition and Notification tier releases in two weeks after that as with previous Twine NH releases.

Still some patron stuff I owe and is not done which was not completed for this update, but the idea of this dragging on into August was obviously a no go. So what I'm going to do is the next update, which I'm hoping I should be able to get out by end of August, will contain the patron stuff that I said would be in the next update. Not going to do a Direction Polling to purely focus on that. It will contain a common Assignment which I think people are going to have fun with so don't worry about it being too exclusive and/or hard to find content.

There will be streams again with the first one being on Thursday or Friday. These will be bug fixing initially, and I've also thought of two new things to add to left UI menu which I think would be solid value adds that'd be great to do with streaming as they're both going to be fairly repetitive but not need much in the way of hard thinking so off chance one or two of those also makes into the next update.

November + December - To Bind Justice : Still mulling over the new pose, have seen some progress though.

Jan to Apr - The Sissy Farm : It's done, it's great, will be posting it tomorrow, and I'll include it in the hotfix.

May + Jun - Irate Ideologies : and May + Jun - To Save a Succubus : Still need to arrange these two. Been so deep into getting 0.4 out I really haven't any focus for anything else. WIll be reaching out to Murr for the Irate follow up and someone else for this one later this week to get those started.

As for the commission poll for this month which is the Jul + Aug one I'm going to put up next week and run it during August. For now, I'm going to retire doing the Alternative single character polls.

Don't really want to do that, has to be done though, as I can't really justify it anymore in terms of the extra expense. It's not the same as it was five years ago or so when I started ramping up commissions. I try not to talk about external factors going on in the world, cause y'know as mentioned so many times, I tend to struggle mentally as it is, but the decline of the dollar which is how patreon pays me to the pound which is how I pay to be able to exist this year has really hurt. That's despite the patreon actually staying fairly consistent in terms of support during this rocky period, which oh man, I really do super appreciate.

The other factor is artists gotta eat too. Back then what I could expect to pay for a reasonably quality single character piece has basically doubled, and that's talking at the cheapest possible still viable option. For some artists who I've often used it's a fair whack more than that now. It is most definitely rough all over for everyone. Hell, when I had one specific artist back then compared to now it's genuinely quadrupled to what they were willing to do for me. Alas, did have to stop working with them which is a real shame cause that was pretty dang nice in that period always having them as an option when the funds needed to be stretched.

So yeah, not ideal, but I hope you understand why I made that decision. It's not like I'm not super behind on using the art I do have anyway. So I've got many completed pieces to catch up on to implement, as the twine conversion picks up in terms of functionality, and I can start adding more new content again.

Thanks again as always for you reading this, for your patience, and your support.