Dev Update 15th March (Patreon)

Hi folks,

I know it's been a while since my last update, but I wanted to be 100% sure before making some announcements.

Regarding the future of WTHI: Over the past few weeks, I've been thinking long and hard about how I will continue to balance working on the game, plus trying to work on my real job and still have time to actually have a life / spend time with my family. Every year, it gets tougher and tougher to try to carve out an extra 50+ hours a week in addition to my real-life full-time job. (that's just my time, doesn’t include Cell working full-time, plus the various subcontractors we use for animations, etc.). There is still a lot of work left on the re-do and also episode 25 finale and epilogues (to give the game the ending it deserves) and progress on the game over the past 18 months has been way too slow. And I am no longer able to pull all-nighters and work 18hrs solid on the game when needed. So… I have deduced that I cannot continue as is and the solution that I have decided on is that I am going to quit my real life job and give my full attention to WTHI.

This is a massive decision for me as I have a very secure and decent-paying job, but I have decided to pin my hopes on being a full-time developer. I've been with my (real-life) job since start-up and the owner has become a friend of mine over the years, so I have promised him that I'll give him at least a couple of months to help close out some contracts and also help find a back-fill. It is a small / niche market, so once I leave and am back-filled, there won't be much chance of getting my job back if the developer thing goes tits-up, so fingers crossed! :)

So… this means that the re-do release (especially on Steam) is going to be make-or-break to make sure I don't live to regret my decision. I am quitting a stable/salaried/pensionable role and diving into the unknown, so I hope everyone understands that this means that I will continue to obsess / focus on season 1 re-do until it is ready for steam release (We will also release on my Patreon, so patrons won't miss out.) In the meantime, I am going to increase my efforts to expand the team, so that by the time I leave my job, I hope to have a larger team ready to go and more time to coordinate work across this team, whilst also having the time to continue personally working on art/writing/coding, too. With a larger team and with me being able to dedicate a lot more hours per week…. Things could / should move a LOT quicker and we can finally finish Where the heart is before we all die of old age.

So, I just wanted to say a MASSIVE thanks to every one of you who have supported me through the years (and continue to support). Without you and your support (financial and via comments/positivity), I would not be making this decision and I really hope this will eventually super-charge progress on WTHI. I also have plenty of game ideas for life after WTHI (but let's not get too far ahead of ourselves.). So… for the next couple of months, I will continue to work on WTHI and my full-time job, but after that… I'm fully focused on WTHI… and hopefully should have a larger team too (not too large as I still want to be personally involved in ALL aspects of the game). I'll keep you posted and try not to bitch-out and beg my boss to let me rescind my resignation. :) :)

The next demo release will be out at the end of this month. It will add another (at least) 50% to the previous demo. We currently have a portion of this with our QC/beta test team and we will keep working away to add more content until the end of the month to try to pack as much in as possible. I also (finally) have mapped out the full chronology of events in Season 1 (to fit in the new scenes / change timelines / allow different decisions, etc.) so that will make things easier now. In addition to everything you will see in the next demo (at the end of this month), we have a LOT more work done, just not demo-ready / playable…. So don't think that what you see in the demo is all we have. Once this next demo is released… My future updates will include % readiness of completion (i.e. writing is xx % done and artwork is yy% is done) as we are far enough along where I should now be able to give accurate updates.

Please let me know if any questions / comments in the comment section below or via private message and I'll get back to all of you

Thanks a lot,

(Nervous and excited)

CG