Not that this is going to be a "Standard" thing, of popping in on Saturdays necessarily, just thought I'd check in today, give you guys all a pretty heavy heads up and general update.

This is where I'm now going to just be writing up little weekly installments of news here and there. At least at some point in the Sun-Sat week, you'll hear from me. Think of them as weekly catch ups/progress logs, basically serve as what the Monday Newsletters were, but just not sticking to any strict schedules.

Sorry we still don't have official channels we use to show actual percentage markers and stuff, like we've tried that with Trello, but getting 6+ at the same time to contribute to that, outline their work progression? Pretty much impossible. At the same time, I've never myself even understood how that stuff could possibly be figured out? "Yeah gang, we did 13% more in artwork this week." What? You know much art is going to be done from start to finish, right now? "13%"? What sense does that possibly make? I don't know, anyway...

Yeah, this will be used for me to just talk about where we're at, what I've personally seen and heard of, in terms of development, etc. So it should be pretty easy to fill out, as its a more freeform sorta thing. Helps me get my own thoughts out in general.

Anyway, talking about this past week, we've had some significant things get taken care of, both in a good way, and a "we learned a lot by failing" way. The learning by failure aspect has been particularly because of yours truly, Morah, and I'm really sorry to say that the game has suffered in delays from... as early as say September, because of me. The issues that we as a team face with regards to the sheer degree of Art we need to produce will always be there, Psymind's work will always take a great deal of time to get done because of the combination of his current skill level as well as standard of quality he wishes to achieve in Dark Dimensions. That's a measure of time and resources we're willing to put in because the results are always quality *because* of those sacrifices, so that's just what it is, ultimately.

The real main *issue* that we've been dealt with, however, is not one of sacrifice of a greater means. It's been an issue of complacency, procrastination, a lack of drive to ask for help, and a failure to realize what I'm good at and what I'm not. I'm talking directly about myself here, by the way, this isn't just some general vaguery I'm trying to skirt around. I have been negligent in my duties as a game dev, both as a functional cog that actually helps move the game along and forward, and as an ambassador of the team that's meant to communicate to you all. So for that, I just wanna apologize upfront, and also then give some explanation of what's the actual situation.

So, I'm not a writer by my nature, even though that's what I wanted to be when I went to college. I can't just *produce* dialogue and interactions between characters out of the blue. I just see character names with blank spaces next to them, and just sorta panic. Lostraven however, is much, much better and disciplined at just "doing" when it comes to dialogue and story work. He's a champ at that and I am much better served as an editor, a revisor, a "Framer" of things like angles, character consistency, and being an overall archiver. I'm not adept at just producing things out of the air, I get in my own head about things like that. So that's caused me to put off doing things as "simple" as writing lines of optional dialogue interactions we wanna put in, because I know I want that in the game. And I've had an absolutely impossible time of reaching out to just be like "Hey, I could use list of XYZ written out, about XYZ subject matters."

Which is ridiculous to think about now, because, after being called out by my team for this piss poor behavior, and then asking for said XYZ material, LR immediately produced the remaining material I needed. Which is both relieving and just embarrassing on my end, that I couldn't think to just ask for help. It's been a whirlwind of feeling disappointed in myself, but also a great learning practice in knowing that this stuff needn't be the headaches we make it. I can't help things like artwork speed up any better, outside of doodling and sketching placeholder backgrounds myself, but still... I don't want to be the reason this game is delayed any further.

And I don't think I will be! We've got a better system in place to prevent this happening, LR has pledged to be more hands on with staff to make sure we are getting things done on a proper pace, which keeps me and everybody else accountable. I also know I can quickly correct these scripts in a flash so as to not keep us struggling to know what our updates are gonna consist of. The following update after this one will NOT be an issue of my doing, and I think that's only going to greatly increase the speed of this stuff. Everybody else on the team is constantly working daily when there's room to be done, so I know it's not gonna be an issue to produce that stuff.

Again, I can do nothing more than just apologize profusely and say this was a previous issue with the likes of Amity Park as well when I worked on that game, but this feels like a much bigger awakening for me and my situation. I hope I can earn your trust and belief by being more proactive and attentive in the proper channels like this one.

Okay, so beyond that, what do we got going on? Well Psy actually finished up another Portrait for an upcoming character, we have some sketches being produced for our backgrounds and for the CG, placeholder as they may be, and Shroe, our animator, is sailing through these animations for character idles and expression switching, now that we've got a proper system in place for him. Took awhile to get out a number of the kinks and eb and flows of the handoff systems, but we should be golden now.

New Character Portrait coming either tonight or tomorrow morning. More Sneak Peaks of stuff also coming down the pipe. We're still NOT giving an estimate of when we expect a due date to save us any further headache, but my guess is that within the next week or so, we'll be close to announcing an actual due date. Our ducks will be in a row, I swear, I swear...

Anyway, feel free to shit on me in the comments as I would rightly deserve, but just know I'm gonna be making it up on the backend. Enjoy your Valentines Day as well, hope it's good for you all!

-Morah & the SDG Team