Hello, you awesome people! A janitor accidentally hit the switch on my hibernation pod.

Glad to see that someone is still here. I can't imagine what made you stay, but I'm grateful beyond words. To those who left: Thank you for standing your ground for as long as you could.

You are stars!

Before writing this post, I gave a deep thought about what am I getting back to? Let's be honest: This thing stuck. I put myself in situation of those devs who chose a development format that doesn't suit them. The approach I've taken about "building a huge update as a big ol' foundation" is not working for me.

If I'm going to come back, then something needs to be done about it, so that I don't step on the same rake.

So what now? I'm changing the format of this whole thing. Even more fundamentally than I planned before. I think that's something that devs in this situation should consider. If I'm going back to how it was, it will defeat me again, I'm sure.

So, what's going to change:

1. Updates change to “bit by bit” basis. Meaning, as soon as several workable implementations are made (map, quest, characters tied to the quest, etc.), the game will be updated, regardless of how significant they are or not. That way feels more fitting to me. Now players can control how much content they want in the build, waiting over a few updates by themselves.

2. I'm rebooting this thing. I mixed a lot of finished and unfinished stuff in the game, if I'm switching to “quick updates”, it has to be rebooted. It sounds like a big deal, but actually I expect the game to catch up to the current state relatively quickly. Because the heaviest assets are mostly ready.

Right now it's a big raw, unfinished alpha. With a lot of assets (ready, semi-ready, yet to be made) not all being implemented, practically all over the game, including the beginning.

Releasing it in this state, and then update it like that, won't do good, I reckon. If you remember I tried that before, when I released a build with plenty of additional locations and added intractable stuff to it later. This ended up getting me negative feedback from new players who didn't know that some areas of the game were under construction. I think it affected ratings in some cases, scaring off players. I guess, the “game is under construction” warning wasn't that eye-catching.

So, the new approach to development sets me up to rename the game to TDLT Reboot or something, and work on finalizing the assets, updating the game from the very beginning, gradually adding everything.

3. The development will be more open. I'll be dropping-in posts about what I am currently working on. I like how I did it on my website previously, but since the site is dead, I'll be doing it here. It won't be the same, cause Patreon isn't Twitter, it can't do short unobtrusive posts, but I'll try to organize something.

If you worry about spoilers, I'll give warnings, but personally, I consider only showing writing and CG scenes to be spoilers, you won't see these here.

Probably I'll be hiding that under “patreon-only” posts sometime later. We'll see.

These are all the changes considering the game's development.

🚧

Now these are about Subscribing:

- Subscriber rewards have been changed on access to polls and access to patron-only posts, for now. The previous rewards weren't too popular anyway. Now my patreon moved closer to being a mere donation page, with some little perks and privileges. I'll think on something desirable to add later. Everyone who signed up before, counting on previous rewards, may receive them, of course.

- My payouts are blocked. Due to sanctions, I receive no money from here. Patreon tech support says they don't mind if someone abroad can receive payouts instead, who can redirect them to me. But I don't know anyone who'd be willing to do that yet.

So, if you want me to actually get your donations, which is extremely important now – the bills are piling up. You can do that via these alternatives:

But if you're willing to support me only on Patreon, you might want to know, that this is also helpful, because you invest in my future relocation abroad. I plan to find a quiet unsanctioned place to continue working without problems. But for that this page has to accumulate $1k per month at least, so I'd have something to back me up there. I'm sure my project is good enough to achieve that, so I'll be working hard towards that goal.

Alright, that's all I wanted to cover with the post about changes.

I want to talk about AI next, but I'll move it to another post, that will appear in a minute.

See you there!