Developer's Note - Good and Bad News

Hey everyone!

I have some updates for you today, mostly about my life but also about the game project. There’s a mix of good and bad news.

As you know, I've been struggling to balance my job as a firefighter with developing the game. I feel the pressure to release regular updates to maintain a certain standard, which leaves me with almost no time for anything else. The biggest challenge has been creating renders, which is very time-consuming. I'll talk more about this and hiring extra help for rendering later. I've decided to take unpaid leave from my firefighting job until the end of the year to try to organize everything better. Your support has been so great that I might be able to focus on game development full-time. So, from August to December, I won’t have the burden of firefighting, giving me more time for myself and the game. However, I need to train people to take over my firefighting duties, which will take up half of August. This might delay the release of update 3.1 to early September if we can’t get everything done on time. It’s not certain yet, but I wanted to let you know.

Now, about rendering and hiring extra help. We've been searching for an artist for a long time without success. We've tested many promising candidates, but there were always issues. Training and checking these candidates took a lot of time and caused delays. We wanted to hire multiple artists to release bigger updates faster and reduce my 12-hour workdays. But it ended up causing more delays. So, we’ve decided to stop actively searching for new artists and hope that a highly skilled one will eventually reach out to us. We want to maintain or even improve the quality of our graphics.

That’s all for this week. Our plan is still to release episode 3.1 in early August, but we’ll know for sure next week if we can make that happen. We aim to release three more updates this year: two smaller ones (episodes 3.1 and 3.2) and a major one (episode 4.0) in December. Even if we have to delay 3.1, we’re determined to release 4.0 by December.

That’s all for now. Have a great Sunday, and may Riley be with you!

TL;DR - The future is stormy, but it looks bright!