12/5/20 Status Update (Patreon)

Naked Ambition .55 will be out this weekend, either Saturday or Sunday. Wait a minute, Saturday or Sunday? This was supposed to be finished a week ago and I don't even know if I'll be able to get it done by tomorrow or not? Yeah, so I've been having a bit of trouble with this one. Writing Ulric's route should be easy considering I know what happens and it doesn't even have a split, but it didn't exactly end up that way. Writing is funny that way, what flows or not is unpredictable. I can make myself sit down in front om my computer and stare at the open file all I want, but sometimes it just doesn't come. Writers block is a real thing.

I'm not exactly making excuses or anything since I'm actually delaying the update, just making slower progress than I want. The whole .5 release cycle has taken longer than I wanted it to. But that's game development for you, it takes time and quite often more time than you expected. But after this week it's on to .6 which will be a doozy. .6 is where we get out of the setup and into the rising action. The Festival of the Moon is where the real break points in the story start. Of course, you won't get to see where those break points lead since .6 is only three weeks long, but we're starting to get there. 

In other news, my new target date for the release of the side game is April. I should really stop calling it a side game though, as it really isn't anymore. It's a pretty big project at this point. I've written about 10% of it and I'm already at ~30,000 words so to reach my target goal I have to just write about half the length of War and Peace in four months while also making two other games. Sounds easy enough.

In all seriousness, updates for Naked Ambition and TF Card battle might come out slower in the coming months because of the work I have to put into the new game. Believe me, when I started I did not plan for it to be this big but to achieve my design goals the script of the game had to be expanded substantially. And I can't put it on hold because I've already invested about $5,000 into it and need a return at some point for that. But it will all be worth it, I promise. I've always framed this patreon more as supporting Apollo Seven Games the studio than any specific project and I hope any slowdown in output doesn't lower your confidence in me. I am working pretty hard at the moment, just a lot of it is on things you can't really see right now.

Since I spoiled one of the animations from Naked Ambition .5 last week, I don't really want to show the other one to keep at least something a surprise. So since I talked about the new game a lot, here's some background color studies to give you an idea of what kind of setting the game has.

I think it's really going to shape up to be something special. I just have to manage to actually get it done without hugely impacting my other projects.

That's all for this week. As always, thanks for your continued support.