Early Corp Dev Memo (always transparent and open)

Hi everyone,

I am doing this update a bit early because of something that happened this week.  I am always a believer in being totally honest and open about everything.  I'll never change in that sense, as I believe anyone that pays even a single dollar for any type of service should always deserve that level of respect and open communication.

A few days ago, my computer suffered a massive failure to the hard drive essentially making it unable to boot at all.  Long story short, I have brought on a specialist in data recovery and tech and he has taken my computer in to see what he can do to fix things.  But it seems the main SSD is the broken culprit with data recovery attempts forthcoming.  The computer itself looks very good to fix with a new boot SSD drive, but I intend to buy a new computer anyway now because of this situation as I want a new system as my main moving forward.  So I'll likely have two computers dedicated to this in a week or two regardless.  So...I've been dealing with going over everything relating to this over the past few days and while it's been stressful -- especially at first -- I am now calming back into a good work mode.

What does this mean for Episode8?

Ok, so I have been doing rudimentary backups at times (this is going to change, I am getting advice from tech people know about things called RAID and online synced backups, etc.)  and after looking over everything, I appear to currently have no matter what about 930 renders backed up and available even if my drive is completely lost.  So I believe I have currently lost about 10 days of progress and some additional 20 renders I prepared on the sub harsh poll but didn't backup yet.  I have about 97% of the character dufs (this is the main concern for me with Daz Studio) saved and backed up, and am only missing Cassandra, Otto, and a few side characters.  I can find these ok because they are not super altered.  If my drive can successfully do data recovery, then of course it will barely be a hiccup except some time spent on all this tech stuff.  If it's gone completely, I will probably have to redo a little bit of work to catch up.

Next Steps:

My main priority right now will be going over all my assets, renders, script, files, and putting together everything I have and for now, just moving farther in the story with more writing and work moving forward.  I want to sincerely thank the seven people in my private Discord chat I created the first day this happened as I legitimately panicked and thought I was doomed before realizing I still had a lot of things backed up, and could address certain things.  I am lucky that I also had Anais and a slave with a ton of stuff backed up too.  But for now, I have to wait until maybe Tuesday or Wednesday next week to get my computer back (they are working on it) so I will focus a bit more on just writing the script for now on my laptop absent a little bit that others can do on renders.  (I am now on the sub path and I usually tend to prefer to do most of these myself)  I will also likely know at the same time next week how much of that lost time was recoverable or not from my hard drive that seems to have died.

I also sat with my business partner and Anais (going over design projects and what they can help cover for me a week) and now I'm going to take a full week off from work in September to "catch up" as best as I can to try to get back to where I hoped to be by the end of that month. 

I am hopeful that data can be recovered and if so, that extra week off will be even better for progress on the game.  But if not (drive is dead dead and unrecoverable) then I will focus on making sure I catch up as best as I can, etc.  I will be rebuilding on likely two independent computers a full update on Daz (render program), Renpy (script/game programs), and doing it with some real tech help to also figure out synced backups, etc.  So this will take a bit of my time  mid next week as I start to get everything delivered to me.

I can't take off next week from work so I likely will be stuck more on this tech stuff and some writing versus a ton of rendering, but I think the following week is when I will take off and I may even try and sneak in a bit more time off if necessary.  I am committed to always trying to deliver things to Patrons as reasonably quickly as possible without losing quality.  If I feel September is not where it should be at the end of the month, I will talk to all of you about turning off billing for October.  In short, I'll leave it up to all of you and I'll accept your verdict.  I know I have turned off monthly billing I think three times before in this game's Patreon life cycle, and I am willing to consider it again here as well.  I'm also honestly allocating all of September's payout towards the new computer, and adding whatever else I need myself to buy a really nice system.  (likely in the 5k range)  This may help in the long run of course with faster renders (RTX 4090 is quite a bit faster than the 3090)

So I wrote this earlier because I figured I should update as soon as I felt I knew the overall situation, and I don't feel anything will change that much between now and my normal Sunday update.  (maybe a bit more writing, but I don't expect data updates until mid next week)  I may do another small update the middle of next week if I have a handle on the tech side again, but not sure until I know more.

I am sorry that I didn't have the foresight to always be updating constantly in real time (I am the worst tech person ever and I know it) causing a possible loss of some progress, but now I'm going to work on this too.  I really appreciate anyone that supports and likes playing the game, and I will do everything in my power to get back to speed, etc.  

Just bear with me for these next nine days as I focus on also setting up a new long-term office (I am designing and changing a new room in my condo with my fourth bedroom being converted to a computer/work center area) that will be cooler (to help the computers stay cool) and work area only.  I actually think this change will end up in the long run helping a lot more than any time I may have lost now worst case.  

I also have to take off one day in early September for another game, and while I am under an NDA, now I think it can be a little more obvious to wise eyes that play a lot of normal games why...

So that's my update for now.  I wish it was all roses and cute puppies, (ok in my case more fucks and domination, etc.) but I promise I will focusing hard on these issues to get things where I want for all of you.  I am also sorry for the long wall of text, but I want to try and cover exactly where my head is, my plans, and what I am doing to execute it, etc.