Work progress on 1.8

It's been a while since I've done a progress post, so it's about time to rectify that. First things first - August was pretty productive. I've made a good head start on the update and have been moving forward quite steadily. I even found time for a big post about lore. By the way, there won't be any such posts in the near future, all my energies are on game development and only on it.

The unpleasant part.

September, however... Well, I had the idea of using euphemisms, but I probably shouldn't do that here. I'll just write it down as it happened. At the very beginning of the month, a boom arrived, closer than any in the last three years. Only ~200 meters from my house (yep, I was watching from my window, well, a few meters from the window, just in case). Luckily it was more of a high-precision thing rather than a heavily packed with explosives. Although, the windows in the nearby houses were blown out anyway. I was “lucky” here too, the neighboring house blocked mine from the blast wave, so my windows were still intact. Yeah, that was that close.

All in all, it is one thing to watch booms from a window that are kilometers away from you, or even somewhere out there on the very horizon, but it is quite another when it is so close. Psychologically it affected me very badly. The first week I couldn't even sleep normally, I kept waking up. I dreamed that something near me was exploding (which was not the real thing, just dreams...). Then it somehow became easier, although a nasty feeling of anxiety is still there. I still wake up sometimes from “explosions” in my sleep, which are not real. Stupid subconscious ... just shut the fuck up already...

As you might have guessed, this had a bad effect on the progress of development in September. At best, I did 50% of what I had planned, and that was when I wasn't too sluggish due to lack of sleep. But still got at least that done.

The normal part.

There were also purely creative difficulties. With one particular scene... No, not even with it, but with one of the lines of dialog that not everyone will even find. Usually, when working on a draft, my internal quality compass tells me that this scene is “good”, so I save it to carry over into the game. And that scene is “crap”, so I rework it, partially or completely, until my internal compass shows “good”. But with this scene (which I've already redone several times), the compass shows... nothing. Neither “good” nor “crap”. I left it like that, continuing to work on the game further. Let this moment settle inside, so to speak, maybe sometime later the compass arrow will move in some direction after all.

Just so you understand, this scene - this damn tiny part of it! - was plaguing me for days. And I can't just pull it out and throw it away, because the question it raises interests many players. I've seen it through a lot of comments. So, this is not a case where you can backpedal.

Other than that, from the finished part, I can tell you that there will be some pretty long “branches” in this episode. What I mean by that is that once you make some decisions, you'll find that the sequence of events after them will drag on for... well, longer than usual. It also shifts the focus of my work a lot to working through the draft. I still have unfinished “tails” in the early part of the episode, though I'm getting somewhere close to the notional midpoint of the update on some of the other “branches”. Of course, no unfinished stuff will be in the game by the time the update is released. An episode should be a seamless piece of a larger story. That's the way it was and that's the way it will be this time too.

The plans.

I originally expected to release 1.8 sometime in late October. But given the much more modest than expected results in September, it's probably better to count on November. I will try to speed things up and catch up in October, but that may be easier said than done. But I'll still try.

So, for now, let it be November, without concrete, sorry. But the sooner the better - that's obvious.

P.S. And no, DamnedFrog, I'm not giving Selene a greatsword. This isn't Skyrim.

P.P.S. The katana thing was also a joke. Well, just to be safe.

P.P.P.S. xD