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Queer games by a geeky dyke

Delays and delayed excuses

2018-07-07 23:58

tl;dr Some more or less unexpected things came up, so Rose Seed Replica won't release on time. Sorry! Hopefully it'll be out by September or something.

The longer version is that I kind of underestimated some development things and also hit some real life issues and such. And the real life stuff messed up my schedule really bad, so I didn't know for the longest time how much things would be delayed exactly. Hence the, uh, delayed delay announcement.

Anyway, it now looks like the release won't be until August or September at this rate, so there we go. It sucks, but sometimes things just don't go as planned, and when you're working solo, there's only so much you can do to compensate for the blunders and unexpected troubles. But what happened exactly? Well, here come the lousy excuses...

1. Scope creep

Long story short, I kind of ended up exceeding the intended 100k word count by over 10%. Like, it looked good when it was at some 90k+ after the main writing phase, but editing and adding transition scenes and whatnot after that made it blow up far more than I expected.

Well, this is the first time I wrote anything this big, so I guess it's no big surprise I didn't get it right. And that's just 10%, right? Well, yeah, but it's also 10% more scripting, editing and testing, and that messes up the schedule quite bad already.

2. Scripting woes

Alright, so we got 10% extra work to do, and it turns out that scripting all the poses, facial expressions, speech patterns, pathing and such is much slower and more tedious than I was hoping too. Oops!

Well, I was already prepared for it being tough, but I guess not enough. Like, it's a pain because poses and facial expressions change all the time. But the game really needs that expressiveness, so I just got to suck up and do it even if it's tough.

3. Getting sick

As if it wasn't perfect enough already, I also got sick in May. No, no, not because of overworking myself, but just regularly sick. Anyway, that was a few weeks of getting nothing done already, and after that I had a lot of trouble getting up to speed again, which made it even worse. It was quite bad, to be honest.

But, well, it's not something I could have really anticipated, and there was nothing I could really do about it. I rarely get sick for longer than a few days, and working while you're sick is just a plain terrible idea, so oh well. No one else around to do the work here, so getting sick is just plain old delay.

4. Real life

Yeah, I know it's most unexpected, but I also happened to somehow get a life recently. And not just any kind of lousy life, but a really wonderful one that kind of helped me ditch that 24/7 workaholism issue I had before.

And, well, since I very much like to cherish this awesome life thing, I have been working regular hours for a while now. Well, mostly at least. But, anyway, there's no way I can do any superhuman catch up maneuvers anymore, so any delays are going to be real. Sorry!

What now?

Well, the delay can't be helped, so I'll just disregard the original schedule and continue working normally until the game is all finished and polished. In other words, this is what will likely happen:

  • Finish scripting
  • Create a few pieces of missing artwork
  • Test and polish the game myself
  • Closed beta testing
  • Release in August or September, hopefully
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