Progress Report

Hey, y'all! So sorry for how long this one has been taking! We're still aiming to have it out by the end of the month, and we're still on track for that at least right this moment.

Endings are a hard thing to get right, and the long delay in this release is almost entirely a consequence of being unable to achieve something that reaches my high standards. I've spent a lot of time just sitting on in-progress versions of the scene racking my brain for how I'm going to get it across the line. Sadly for me, that process bore little fruit and with this now being the longest wait between two updates as far as I can recall, I've shifted toward a more aggressive approach in order to prioritize getting it done and out while hopefully still achieving a level of quality I'm satisfied with.

With that in mind, I took the imperfect version of the sequence I had and finished that as-is in order to push it to the team for feedback. In doing so, I was able to properly leverage my new editing tools and I'm pleased to report that this part of the process went very well and produced some of the best dialogue and narration we've seen in Sileo to date. 

As of writing this, only CurryCatz has completed his review of the content so far. He seemed quite pleased with the quality and felt that what was there was excellent, but agreed with me that something was missing. Thankfully, we've been able to hone in on a few specific spots in the script where those "somethings" ought to be, and while I haven't figured out exactly what will be going into them, I do have a few ideas I can work with. Furthermore, Kronos still has yet to complete his review which should be happening fairly soon and with any luck, his feedback might help answer that question.

Either way, those additions will be completed later today come rain or shine, and with any luck the final result will be something release worthy. It may or may not fit within my definition of perfect, but perfection can often serve as a red herring that impedes progress. A good scene released is better than a perfect one not, something that was already intended to be part of my writing strategy for post-Tai's route material but will now likely be the thing that gets the final update of that route across the line. I've always been the kind of person who learned things the hard way, and if there were any doubt about my strategy for new material prior to beginning work on this final chapter, those doubts have all but been quashed with this timely reminder and this one last hurrah of the very thing that impeded progress in Tai's Route and made the entire process so long winded and arduous. I'd hoped to finish Tai's Route more consistently with how it'd been developed up until this point, but if it's ever to be finished, that simply cannot be so.

Content aside, the build is done and will just require our usual testing and release preparations once the final chapter is considered complete. Thanks so much for being so patient, and I really hope the final result ends up being worth such a long wait! Either way, you won't have to wait long to find out.