So what's going on? Why the radio silence? Where have you been for the last few weeks?!

Well, for starters I buried my head in the sand. The last update didn't exactly go swimmingly. It seemed like every time I checked - TFGames, F95Zone, Itch - there'd be a brand new bug report, detailing how this thing or that thing didnt' work. And this was after I'd released the last Hotfix. Maybe I'm exaggerating - it's entirely possible it was only a couple posts, but that was literally all I could see or focus on. Just negative feedback about how x or y or z didn't work. I felt overwhelmed. I felt like quitting. And for a little while I did pretty much nothing, other than wonder if there was any point in continuining with the game.

I mean, I'd basically hit a sort of soft ending, right? All the basic mechanics were in place. The Girl Games event was there. Outside from the final Dylan hookup, I could potentially draw a line under the whole thing, write a big explanation/apology post on here, say thanks and sorry and call it a day.

But the thing is, and I know I've said this before on here a bunch of times, I really do want this to be the best version of the game in my head that it can possibly be. And it's still so far from that. So instead I took a break ... not from making the game, but from checking in online. This was literally until about ten minutes ago when I started writing this post. If I'm honest, I still feel kinda wary about logging into any of the aforementioned forums, because I supect there'll be even more bug reports and basically nothing else other than tumbleweeds.

And instead of checking in online - and I apologise for letting this aspect of things slip too, because you guys really do deserve to know what's been going on - I figured it was time to push forward with Version 0.6 instead.

The last hotfix kind of proved my point; things weren't just straining under the poor design choices, they were outright breaking. So here's what I've done since I last posted on here: I've started remaking the game brick by brick, making sure that at each point it's as robust as it can be.

And don't worry. This is not going to take as long as it might sound - a lot of it is already fine, but it seems honestly better this way to interrogate each piece as i put it back into a duplicate project, making sure that none of the previous documented issues will come up again in future. Now that I have all those bug reports, I know exactly which bits to focus on, which bits to improve. So far I have the main campus location up and running again (complete with better UI), with a seperate config file to break out all the setting options. And my plan is to work the game back up to where it was, plus the final Dylan stuff, as the first main iteration of 0.6. To be clear, this won't be done by the end of the month, and if you want to check out for a while, I'll totally understand, but there was honestly no alternative that I can see, other than throwing in the towel.

I need this game to be functional (and scaleable) to be able to continue working on it, and seeing as pretty much the only feedback I received from the last Hotfix was negative, I really need to do this to ensure that I can make a much stronger foundation going fowards. As always, I look back at earlier version of the game, and cringe at the many times when I made claims like "this is it, this is the final version!" only to be writing something this. But ultimately, this is still pushing things forward. I care about this game so fucking deeply. Like I said, I want this to be the very best version of itself it can possibly be. If you think about the initial Twine version compared to 0.5, then hopefully you can see how far it's come already, and 0.6 will be even better.

And now that I've finally pulled my head out of the sand, I'll be sharing more updates and private test builds on 0.6 as I work on it more. if you have any questions or thoughts, please drop them in the comments or in a private DM and I'll answer them as soon as I can. I know that if you're here, supporting me, then hopefully you can understand my vision for this game and are along for the ride, but if you have any concerns about this development, i'm open to the discussion too.

Dana x