Progress Report (Patreon)

Alright folks, I'm doing a fair bit better than I was the last time I posted. Not great, honestly. But better, at least. I've had time to step back, take a deep breath, and figure out what to do about at least some of the clusterfucks that have occurred. On that note, there are two things to cover in this little mini-report.

The first is the Haven's Port build. I was, unfortunately, right to expect that yesterday was essentially a complete write off. Add in the completely unexpected loss of Sunday and there was zero chance I was going to hit the end-of-month release date. That said, after taking a good hard look at everything, I don't think it's as bad as I feared. Right now, I've got around ten scenes both written and edited, and I'm expecting to raise that number to fifteen or so before I crash. I also managed to squeeze in a lot of the little stuff that still needed to be done, such as updating the Credits and such. 

In my experience, on weekdays that I have to do day-job work, I can only finish/edit around 6-7 scenes per day. And I have a total of around 29 scenes to do. Removing the 15 that I should have done by tomorrow morning when I crash from the equation, and I'm hoping that I'll need just two additional days to get the writing/editing portion of the work done. After that, I'll need most of a day for testing because of the number of changes made. If there were a weekend in there somewhere, I could do it faster. But, as is, my current estimate is that the Build will release either late night on November 3rd or early morning on November 4th. So, either a 3 or 4 day delay. Longer than the delays that occasionally occur when I overreach, which are usually no more than 2 days. But...tolerable. Particularly considering just how massive the build is.

That said, the second thing I want to address is wanting to do as much as possible to keep this delay from causing a snowball effect that haunts me through the rest of the year. Because of that, I'm officially announcing that there will only be one short story next month, which will be whatever the poll winner is. I've done this before, though a lot of you may be new since the last time I was forced to, and unaware of that fact. 

Originally, back when Goals were still a thing Patreon allowed us to have, the second monthly Short Story was actually the result of one such goal. (I'm STILL pissed they removed that feature. It was easily one of the most useful and they didn't even ask, they just yanked it with no warning. Assholes.) Essentially, it was the equivalent of a kickstarter Stretch Goal. Back then, I made it clear that the fact it was essentially a 'bonus' made it the lowest priority reward. That fact has remained true and, on two or three specific occasions, I've curtailed the extra short story in an attempt to free up some time. Normally, I try to warn people much farther in advance that such will be the case. In this specific case, I had no way of knowing I'd be presented with a series of mini-disasters that culminated in a serious worry about snowballing delays. 

Frankly, cutting out that single short story won't save all that much time. It is, however, the only reward that I've ever been willing to temporarily skip. All other rewards are ones I'm uncomfortable with halting, even temporarily. As such, this is basically the only step I can take to try and limit the damage, and therefore I'm taking it in this case.

My apologies again for the delay, folks. This one really kinda caught me out, and there was little or nothing I could do about it :-(.