May 7 Update (Patreon)

With Patreon accounts there is a tendency to constantly stress the amount of work that goes into our games. Some of this is gratitude for everyone who supports us, but I worry that at times it's a cynical PR gambit: "WE ARE WORKING 20 HOURS PER DAY UNTIL OUR FINGERS BLEED I HAVE NOT EATEN IN DAYS" and so on.

I've always tried to be more direct here, and I'm honestly not sure to what degree that's wise. Patrons do often approve of my openness, but I also get negative reactions outside Patreon every time I'm honest about spending time on anything other than someone's project of choice. I wonder if it wouldn't be more effective to just give less information and keep working on the balance I find most efficient.

Having said that, this post will be the opposite of that. To be honest, this past week I did not spend a ton of time working on TLS. What does that look like? Let me tell you!

First, "not a ton" doesn't mean I did nothing on TLS. Here's some stuff I did:

 - Getting feedback and corresponding with fans via forums/emails/etc.

 - Fixed lingering bugs in the Eustrin/Aram content. Those of you who sent them know that there were more than a few.

 - Did organizing work for the next update. What this means practically is taking notes from different places (general plot, character arcs, NPC notes, double tech list, etc) and putting them all into a list of the content I want to include in the update.

 - Wrote content for the new Yhilin iteration. All the characters' chat lines, NPCs, that kind of thing.

 - Wrote a sex scene that won't even be in the next version. I was thinking about future plans and had the scene so clearly in mind, I figured I might as well write it. It is, uh, different from any scene in the game so far, or any scene I've ever read in any adult game.

 - Wrote various bits and pieces, like Dari responding to you doing research on her condition or the end of Yarra's recruitment quest.

 - Commissioned an artist for some TLS art that you guys will hopefully see in a week or two.

See, this is where I wonder if an honest framing isn't shooting myself in the foot. It would be really easy to write up that work as a huge ordeal that took the whole week. But honestly, that's only a fraction of my usual productive capacity.

So, what took up the rest of the time? Multiple things:

Kingdom of Deception: Hreinn Games put out a limited release for our upcoming game (a hardware test) and I finished my end of an impending preview release. That meant a flurry of changes, bugtesting, and assorted work relating to the uploads and such.

Taxes: Not 2016 taxes; I did those back in February. But apparently I'm going to have to make quarterly estimated payments now, so I had to figure that out. -_- It wasn't as bad as I thought, but it's a pain to avoid getting penalized when you have unpredictable income.

Ouroboros Support: Reviews and messages are still coming in for the Newgrounds version, and that version has led to increasing questions about other versions as well. Most notably, we've had more Linux/Android users asking specific questions, so I had to help with those.

Side Project #1: This is one I've alluded to that I hope to be able to release before too long. It's a VN, and I just did the final edit of all the text. Also finished up some final work, so the release of this has mostly to do with missing assets and scheduling. My work is basically done.

Side Project #2: This one is Desecration of Wings, which I already previewed here for $10 backers. I approved some lineart and coloring, but otherwise it's still just puttering along.

Side Project #3: This project is the furthest out, some aspects of it still hazy. Well, after this week, it is way less hazy - I wrote a large chunk of the plot and I'm really happy with how things turned out. I felt enthusiastic enough that I wrote up a preview that I'll show to $10 patrons, but I'll delay posting that while I focus on other stuff.

So there you have it: that is what a scattered week looks like for me. 

I do worry that some people might think, "Sierra is dividing her effort between a bunch of things and won't finish any of them" - and I do think that's a potentially legitimate criticism. But the thing is, most of that isn't dividing my attentions, that's just what the development process actually looks like. The editing on SP#1 and the writing for SP#3 took up significant chunks of development time. There was somewhat more KoD than usual. But otherwise? That's how I normally operate while also trying to make major progress on TLS.

Well, I hope this has been an interesting look into how my workflow goes. Though I'm not sure how the coming week will go, it's likely it will involve mostly TLS work.