UPDATE- Where I've Been/Future Plans/The Hive Issues

Hey there everyone. Hope you've been alright, I know it's been a long time since I've shared an update with you all. The last couple months have been rough to say the least.

Liliana (my fiancée) has been going through a multitude of serious health concerns which have left us in quite a bit of unexpected medical debt. Still don't have all the answers we need, which isn't easy. Been taking on more side gigs and things in the meantime, which has taken up a lot of my free time. On top of this, we had to unfortunately have my 17-year old cat put down last week. He has been slowing down for the past year- likely a form of undiagnosed GI cancer- but there was not much we could do, and it was just his time. I've been trying to find my new normal, but there's a huge void in my life now.

Onto the technical side of things, I'm gonna be honest, I've got some pretty disappointing news to share.

About 3 weeks ago, I discovered that a dozen or so projects (including the OG Miranda scene) from "The Hive" contained an alien-egg model from the Steam workshop that was recently removed by the uploader. Upon checking, I can no longer open most of these projects without instantly crashing SFM because of the memory limit. I'm working on trying to recover these projects as best as I can, but have not had much luck as of yet. I am still troubleshooting.

At this point, I'm left with only a couple options:
- Attempting to rebuild every actual "hive" scene from scratch and dealing with massive inconsistencies between shots which will reset most of my progress, or...
 - Just refocusing my energy/moving on to something else for right now. Not giving up on it, but I may need to regroup and take a break from The Hive in order to avoid the burnout.

I can imagine how incredibly disappointing this is to hear, but just know it's a fraction of what I'm feeling on my end. I've been promising this project for years and just had it kinda blow up in my face. I'm still very committed to finishing this story, but I'm open to hearing what y'all would like to see from me going forward.

In the meantime, I've been working on some *new* small projects the last week or so, just to keep my creative side running including a Choose-Your-Ending animation with Jill Valentine and another Predalien short. 

Will be posting some more teasers of these in the next few days! Thanks for sticking by me, I couldn't imagine getting through all this shit without your support. I promise I will make it up to you all, one way or another. It just may take a little time. Thanks for understanding, y'all.

Much Love,

Erieman2