The world exploding and the plan moving forward.
Please excuse the wall of text, I tried to condense it as much as I could.
Don't worry, nothing bad has or is happening.
I just wanted to give you all an apology and an explanation.
Context:
The past 3-4 months have been a plague of issues, one after another.
I mentioned recently in a previous post that my old man is dealing with medical issues. Specifically, he's torn the rotator cuff in his shoulder and will be undergoing surgery for it. He was scheduled to have his surgery already but it was canceled due to problems with anesthesia. He's seen a specialist and is awaiting results to schedule his surgery for hopefully early/mid July. This has left me picking up the slack with work. Workdays flying around haphazardly, no real schedule, and oftentimes work being scheduled mere hours before attendance.
In addition to all of that, progress on the game has it's own issues causing delays. Building the new in-game house was about 3 months' worth of work, 1 month before v1.6.0 and 2 months of this previous update (1.7.0) have gone into just making the property look as nice as I can. Annoyingly, the property is now causing severe render latency. Looking East/West results in renders taking their normal 5-15min per scene, whereas North/South takes up to 1-2 hours per scene. The picture to this post took 2 hours to render for example, whereas any image looking towards the house was only about 20min at most.
With nearly 250 new images in this previous update, you can imagine how much of a time-sink that ended up being. Thankfully, I have some ideas for what might be causing it and I'm in the process of testing some theories to remedy the issue.
Moving Forward:
Now that you guys know what's been going on for me the past few months, I want to share with you what will be going on in the coming months.
The biggest change is that I'm going to be targeting releases every 3rd weekend of each month regardless of update size. This might be upsetting to some but I believe this is necessary to prevent massive update delays from happening again. There are pros/cons, however, as it means that updates will generally be smaller overall but more frequent/routine.
How this will work, is that updates will be rounded off by pushing to the closest time skip/transition screen. You can see examples of these already in the game, such as black transition screens or fade-to-blur screens before a small time skip happens to the next part of the story. This will inevitably lead to unavoidable cliffhangers that will, in time, be forgotten amongst routine updates. Going this route will be annoying to some and I understand that, but it allows me more time/freedom to put in content that I want in the places that I want that content, rather than cutting it or shoving it down the line into a different update.
So yeah, that's about it.
I'm sorry this recent update has taken such a tremendous amount of time to complete. I'm working on becoming faster at this stuff every day. (Becoming faster is a slow process. Who would've thought lol.)
Thank you all for your patience and support during all of this. ♥