Chapter 8 weekly status report (6) (Patreon)

Hi everyone,

I know last week I missed the weekly status report, but I didn't have much to report: during these two weeks I've been hacking away at the writing, which is proving to be pretty challenging. This chapter is titled "Falling into place" rather fittingly, since there are a lot of moving pieces from chapter 7 and previous one that need to be addressed and developed properly properly. Writing this chapter feels like knitting a convoluted tapestry, trying to make sense of all the threads and ordering them correctly so the final picture makes sense and I'm not skipping anything. This means going over scenes a few times, realizing I forgot to add something or deciding this should go there instead of there, so that other thing can happen later and that other thing is foreshadowed, etc, etc...

Writer's block is something that I've had to deal with on a monthly basis since I began writing GGGB, but it's striking me rather hard with this update, probably because I have to account for so many things when writing a scene and I need to write it several times with a lot of big and small variations, making it pretty cumbersome. When I don't enjoy writing something or really struggle with it I have the feeling the players will be equally bored with it, so sometimes pushing forward feels difficult.

Also, I've been forced to update my Ren'py version and suddenly a lot of unexpected and game-breaking problems with the code have popped up and it's making concentrating on the writing even more challenging. I feel rather frustrated and angry with myself for not being able to advance at the pace I set out, especially considering this was supposed to be a shorter chapter compared to 7 and I wanted to release it faster. 

Anyway, excuse me for all that complaining. I'm not trying to make any excuses and I'm still trying to work as fast and consistently as I can and deliver something up to the quality standards expected from ORS. I can positively say I've written around 7.000 lines of code and I think that amounts to half the chapter's length. I'm working on solving the bugs with the game due to the Ren'py update with the help of my loyal contributors and my focus is on finishing writing as soon as possible. The colorist is still working on the illustrations, but she should be close to finished, so once the writing is done I will edit all of them while bugtesting and proofreading is being done.

I'm not confident yet to announce a release date, but hopefully it won't take much longer. Thank you for your patience and continued support, I'll pull myself together and try to deliver a satisfying chapter for you guys to enjoy as soon as possible!