Hey everyone, been a long time since an update has been provided. I had originally been planning to make a post about two weeks ago, but then I got distracted and in someways I am glad I didn't make the post then since I have some additional information. I also know I said on Friday I would have another post the next day, that changed because I decided that I wanted to include some extra renders with this post, but those are still being rendered at this time, so this post will be updated in a few days to include a zip with all the images.

Let's start off with the good news, that work project that I have been working on since late November will be ending at the end of this month, as I was informed last week, this will give me a fair bit more free time to spend on development, it also results in me returning to my old schedule which I think also worked better for me to have time to set aside for development. Even while working on this work project I have still spent some time working on development when I have had the change, though I have done a pretty poor job tracking the work month to month, so I don't have a month to month breakdown of work done, but I am looking at about 500 lines worked since I went basically radio silent, though some of that is fixing up grammar and spelling errors that have been around for a while, I really wish Visual Studio Code had a functional spelling and grammar checker because I don't write my dialogue in a word doc first, though maybe I will explore how that impacts work flows in the future.

I have not fully decided one way or the other for this, but I am considering holding off on releasing Chapter 6 until the end of the year, and just doing it as one big release, and hopefully 2025 will be the year I can finally commit to a release schedule that I have wanted to do for a while, but something always seems to come up.

With all this news, I do want to state that billing will resume in the next couple of days for the June billing cycle. Thank you to all of you that have been patient through my radio silence and I am happy to finally be able to dedicate time to development again.

I am sure many of you follow releases of these types of games on a certain website, that I shall not name, and know they recently had a security incident where old user accounts were hacked and used to upload copies of game updates that were modified to include malware. This is something that probably should have been a possible concern for releases for a while now, but has generally managed to avoid causing any major issues. As someone that studied cybersecurity, this change going forward is something that probably should have been done from the start, but as mentioned these types of incidents have generally managed to avoid causing any real issues so outside of an abundance of caution didn't really seem to have a need before.

To avoid this potentially being an issue in the future with my releases, I am going to include the SHA256 hash for my releases in the release notes. That way if you download a copy somewhere and run it through a hashing tool for SHA256 and get something different then what I provided, you will know that file has been modified in someway. To start us off with that, going back to the most recent release the SHA256 hashes are as follows:

PC : 6DD249F213520C21A31AB4535EB304D5DFD2F93F23C908C0A92090EAEA44875D

Mac : 42711D023F127309AD9D40E679376628A2FED06B815988C89C5EDCE226610635

The PC (Windows & Linux) and Mac versions will have different hash values due to differences in for example file structures.