While I'm waiting for this to upload -- let's talk!

*TL DR This is a personal post, mostly unrelated to the latest release.*

I'm actually stressing right now.
Why?
Well, partially because I'm a work-a-holic. But the bigger part of this is related to the game and content development. Truthfully, it's difficult for me to determine when enough content is enough.

I only have other projects to base this on, and initially (and even now) I still sort of feel that those projects tend to create more content than I do on a consistent basis.

After playing a few different games I made a realization : they can produce more "content" because they don't really have many features to their games in general. There are a few major differences I observed.

The first is that I generally add way more images / renders to my project than other games do. For a point of reference, most games I've seen only change images once every 10-15 lines. I tend to do it every 2-4 lines. So essentially that's  3-4x times more renders packed into each event. I also try to video to several encounters / scenes as well. Lately I've gotten much better with this - but I still feel it contributes to my thoughts on the matter.

The second is that many other games don't have very many game-like features. I initially started this game without any experience working in Ren'py. Had I known that Ren'py would be a pain in the ass to build an *actual* game from, I'd most likely have done a game-lite kind of version of the project (just being honest). But, 2 months into programming it was a bit too late to change gears. 

In summary, the second thing I noticed is that most of the other games out there are a bit cookie cutter in the sense that they only have the general "progress thru day > work towards event" gameflow wrapped in a low maintenance interface. Which, isn't terrible. Those games are entertaining, I just wanted to offer a bit of depth with my plot.

To date, I've spent almost 1,200 hours( by my estimate) on building(conceptualized in December of last year and started production in January) the project.

During this time a great deal of my energy went into (1) learning 3 languages on the fly, as Ren'py is a combination of 3 languages, all poorly documented yet--fully documented), (2) fixing and revising the framework from scratch(I used a few place holder systems in the beginning but all of that has been scrapped with this update) meaning all your items are gone sorry XD* and (3) trying to commission for the items / poses I don't have. All while attempting to do delivery jobs to supplement my income and eat. Yikes!

As a single person developing this, it was a bit more work than I intended, but I did it because I had a goal in mind. After the past couple of months, I feel I'm closer to that goal than I've ever been.

I'm almost 100% done with adding major features to the game. Everything else already exists and just needs to be updated / polished to be visually comparable to other projects. Posing characters, creating events and writing text are the easy things Ren'py was made to handle, so it's smoother sailing from this point on.

I guess my anxiety comes from the fact that, because other projects don't have to spend time on actual game development, they can make larger amounts of visual or "filler" content. 

That and (0.30) has not been play tested nearly enough for my liking. That's not to say it's a buggy mess, as I actually spent more time bug hunting and testing than usual. But I would feel more comfortable adding more polish / play testing. 

It is the cause and effect of my attempt to catapult the project's backend development so that I could produce better and more exciting content developments thus I can't complain too much though. I do feel conflicted, from a developer's standpoint I realize I've done an absolutely monstrous level of work. I just worry whether that translates well into the latest update.

I feel it's paid off, but  it also makes me a bit apprehensive. This could all just be in my head, to be honest I haven't had the proper time to sit and play the game through from start to finish this month. I will say, that I did aim to make this month's update worth it with enough new events for the current players. The main story progress I hoped to include fell to the way side, and will have to wait for the next update.

For now, I'll start uploading 0.30 and drop the links when it's done.

Then I'm going to go get a back and body massage from a big-t*tty Asian woman, because I need to relax a bit. XD

- Ren