January 24 Update (Patreon)

Throughout the course of TLS, I've done a lot of thinking on how I take notes. I keep a huge number of them, but I have a habit of keeping even more things in my head. In the heat of creative work, there are a lot of things that feel tedious to stop working and record.

I tend to rely on my memory, which works pretty well in the short term, but it's not adequate for a multi-year detail-heavy project. It's become clear that there's a gap between what I expect to remember and what I note down. This is something I'll have to think about more precisely in future long projects.

Anyway, the lack of Feroholm and the Stineford farm is an example of something falling into that gap. In my head, that process didn't complete until the postgame, when in fact I'd set that up in the main iterate event. This is one of the things I'd like to amend in 0.55.3.

It does bug me that I didn't catch it in testing, but unfortunately I didn't use a save that had made those investments. When the game was simpler, I used to keep a bunch of saves up to date, which always helped with thorough testing. Unfortunately, as the game has continued (and especially as so many updates get balance tweaks in the .1 or .2 stage) it's been harder to keep properly updated saves. I could do it, but it would come at a cost to development time.

These are essentially just my current thoughts. I hope I'll be able to make good progress on the "half update" and keep everything moving forward. I think $10 patrons are also due an art post or two, plus I have some finished art on other stuff that I just haven't shown because I've been so focused on TLS.