February progress update

Hello everyone. Time for another progress update.

The new job (and RL) has been less intense than I expected, which has meant I've been able to keep up with my writing. As of today the word count is a smidge over 222k words; 0.4 clocked in at 160k. So another chunky update coming your way. I expect to add another 15k or so and to then be done; editing will add some more as it always does. So this will end up as the biggest update ever - and hopefully the last of that sort for a long while. I'm sure I've mentioned it before but I want to chill out and do smaller but more frequent updates after this.

On the meta side, Whale (the editor I introduced last month) has continued to analyse my efforts and tell me where I'm not meeting my own standards. I'll likely be doing some work based on his suggestions to improve some of the characters, though this will not be right after 0.5. Specifically, I will put in the work to figure out what I want to change about them, and then continue writing as if the changes had already been made to their introductions, but I'll only actually do the changes at some indeterminate future time. It won't be complete changes to who they are or anything, so I don't expect any of the characters to feel fundamentally different post-0.5; it's more just about being 100% sure what matters to each character and exposing that clearly for the player.

Finally, from a worldbuilding perspective, you'll see something new in this update that I decided on only this month. I'm very excited about it because, while it was always in the backstory of the game, I didn't expect to ever bring it up since it didn't really make sense. It may be familiar to a few, but even so, it'll be fresh enough to be interesting I believe :)

There's one other thing I want to discuss but that needs a poll, so I'll do that separately. Anyway, so yeah: March will bill, and 0.5 will land then :)

Cheers,

Zaggy