A bit of reflection

Hello everyone,

I spent the last days dealing with all the things I had delayed for the release of v0.1 AND playing Elden Ring (because the game ain't gonna play itself :x).

After this short pause, as I told you, I'm going to use the current week to prepare everything we need for the promotion of SoS's release announcement.

I also mentionned the fact that I'd make a post about the reasons of such a delay.

Originally, the demo got released on December 7th and I was hoping/planning a mid/end January release. If you followed the whole thing, you know that our colorist (kai) got problems for covid reasons and basically, he disappeared between the end of January and half February.

That alone created a 2-week gap. But even after coming back, he wasn't much available either so we had to hire Carlis (SoV2/NP's colorist) who nicely accepted to help us exceptionnally.

Add to that the fact that Peak hadn't finished all the drawings anyway mid-february and the ending spring became quite a mess as there 3 people working together on pics at the same time (PeakJump, Kai who had a bit of time, and Carlis.) Considering I also had to add my inputs that raised the whole thing to 4 people.

But saying the delay was the other's fault only would be wrong. On my side, I took FOREVER to write that update. And one of the reasons is because I think I actually made a small depression between early January and March. I say "I think" because I'm not a specialist, but for those two months, I was seeing things in black. I'm not going to mention what I think led to me this state (because it's a combination of elements that played at the same time and taken separately, it's so trivial I kinda feel ashamed to have been down for those reasons :x)

Anyway, there's already this huge impact where team members can influence themselves both positively and negatively (in terms of working pace) and here it was clear none of us was driving the others into being faster :/

The death of my grandfather (and before you ask, no it actually has nothing to do with my depression, he was almost a stranger to me :x) had also its impact. Both before his death (I had to lose full afternoons helping my parents to take care of him, buy him stuff or whatever) and even after his death (A LOT of paperwork, house cleaning (in all possible meanings) etc...) So all that were added times where I wasn't able to work.

The last thing I wanted to mention is my own motivation. I'm not going to say that I've become unmotivated, but I think I was also getting tired of making "beginnings/endings" of games. As I've already said through the years, the start and the end of a game are the most tedious parts of game making. And you're more or less still in the "starting" phase when you're still implementing gameplay and stuff like that (at least core gameplay, not necessarily extra side stuff.) So if you look at it from that angle, 2021 was a real nightmare: I started with SoV3's release that was a new game on which we had worked for several months. Then I moved to TH2. It wasn't a new game, but the whole implementation of the brothel gameplay, the fighting etc... made it as tedious. Then I moved to finishing SoVO. And then I started a new game (and I'm not mentionning that my taste of masochism made me start ANOTHER game inside the game dev leading to the creation of SoS - Extra Lessons -_-) I haven't made a single "light" update where I can mindlessly just ask pictures and write stuff. Of course, this is heavily going to change this year. I'm back to a real pace now, switching between the two games, and both TH2 and SoS have enough progress so I can say we're past the beginning phase. But I thought it would be interesting to share that element which explains a good amount of things.

Call that a bad combination of things but in the end, that's why the game got delayed for so long (I think it's the longest delay ever since we were something like one month and a half late.) I don't think it should happen anymore in the future. However, and I'll explain that in a future post, TH2's next update isn't meant to be small for the sake of quicker release. The goal is to have a definite set of elements ready at a point so if it has to take 2 months, that's what it'll take. But don't worry, I'll try to talk about all that stuff in detail in the next post ;)

Anyway, thanks for reading all of that. Thanks for staying on board during that period and thank you for the positive feedbacks. I've read some comments during those two months were people were complaining about the lack of updates for TH2 and that kinda made me happy because the last releases made it look like nobody gave a damn about the game but apparently it's not the case :p

I'll see you in a couple of days for the TH2 planning post.

See ya o/