Поместье : Доминация / Estate : Dominate [v.0.36.0 Fixed Rus / v.0.36.1 Eng + Incest Patch] (2020) (Rus/Eng) [Ren'Py] [MacOS] [Android] [Abandoned]

(slightly premature) Postmortem of this development cycle
Hi everyone,



the most important thing first if you don't want to read a lot of text: the update will be a little later than the tentative release date (25th) I gave you earlier. At my current speed it's going to take me about two extra weeks. I want to make the final public announcement close to the release date, so that's going to happen a little later too.



You might remember that I promised to explain what's been slowing me down so much and why my predictions about development time frames have become unreliable. I originally wanted to do this after the update is out, but I kinda feel like getting this over with today, so here goes.

Fair warning that what follows is private soap opera. It's unavoidable because the unfortunate reality of solo development is that personal challenges turn into work challenges. Doesn't mean you should care about any of it though and I think it's perfectly fine to skip this entire post and judge development solely on results.

Anyway, if you do want to read, it's broken into two parts: First, what's been happening on my side of the screen. Second, why it's so difficult to keep you in the loop about it.



1. Problems

First some background on a mental quirk of mine that plays a role throughout: My mind is very one-track and I'm terrible at multitasking. This is true both on the small scale of a single day and on the larger scale of months or years.
On the small scale, it means that I can usually work many hours without losing focus or dipping in productivity, but on the flip side, I can't deal well with interruptions or several tasks at once.
On the large scale, I love engrossing myself completely in a single project for long stretches of time, but it tends to come at the cost of just about everything else in my life.

When I began work on Estate : Dominate in early 2019, I went into a pronounced version of that large scale, one-track focus. For about a year, I did nothing but eat, sleep and work on the game. Usually more than 100h/week. For the most part that worked fine and it was certainly productive, but by January 2020 there were two changes I needed to make: First, I had to find part-time 'regular' work to deal with the fact that the game is a financial failure, and second, I wanted to reclaim some semblance of a social life because it became obvious that the almost complete isolation from working alone at home for a year was wearing me down. Enter Corona.

Instead of going out a bit more, I had a progressively joyless second year of solitude, now with the additional difficulty of having to multitask game development and regular work from home. If you've been around since development of Release 6 you will remember that the bumpy ride and delays started at that time. However, when R6 was finally out I was quite optimistic that the worst would be over in a few months and I would hit my stride again. Well, unfortunately that didn't happen.

I think it was around the beginning of 2021 that I noticed how difficult it had become for me to get my head into the game and how much effort it took to start being productive. To make matters worse, while I knew what I wanted to write logically, it became apparent that I didn't 'feel' the characters anymore while I was playing with them in my mind. Something that used to be very vivid.

And I still didn't put two and two together. Instead, my mom noticed that I had lost a lot of weight and wasn't too pleased when my casual explanation was several months of gastrointestinal issues. I'll spare you the details about that part. The gist of it is that, development problems aside, I had also been indifferent enough to ignore the symptoms of what a colonoscopy found to be a heavy inflammation of my colon. And the insight of my mom that it's not normal to ignore internal bleeding finally made it click that I wasn't just a bit worn out but was having a fairly solid depression.

That was in April. Since then, I've been working on getting myself back into normal shape and I'm pretty alright now. Colon is fine again, I'm on track to my normal weight, I'm working out daily and take more time for social things.

Depression is much better if not quite gone yet. I don't want to take drugs so I'm going with a slower approach that essentially boils down to 'recognize where your brain derps out and do the right thing even if it feels wrong'. Suits me very well because I like systematically working on skills and building up routines, but it's a gradual improvement, not flipping a switch. I'm also still a bit on the numb side emotionally, which isn't amazing when I try to write and it's currently the biggest source of delays. I'm overall very happy with my progress though.



2. Communication

I know the frustration for many of you is less the delay itself than the feeling of being out of the loop about what's going on at any given time, especially when delays stack up. The understandable request is usually a variation of 'just quickly say what's up. What's so difficult about that'?

Well, let's start with a very general problem, which is overreaction. You know that old PR rule that you should never use the word 'problem' and instead call everything a 'challenge'? I used to laugh about that. Until I wrote 'problem' in a Patreon post and it took like 5 minutes to get a message from someone asking me if the problem means the game is dead now. You quickly learn that it's not worth reporting routine problems that crop up from time to time and will be solved soon anyway.

Which then smoothly leads into the problem that it's impossible to know what's solvable and what isn't beforehand. In hindsight it's always obvious when it doesn't work out, but at any given point I was genuinely convinced I was now on the upward trajectory again, mostly from the experience that it had always worked like that before. It's not like there aren't always ups and downs when you work. The surprising thing was a down following a down following a down.

At which point, yes, you do think that you should explain everything. The thing is, writing about personal problems to several hundred people is decidedly awkward. It's not that I'm shy or embarrassed; I have a decent number of strengths and I have my fair share of weaknesses and there's no point pretending otherwise. My issue is rather that is sounds great to explain everything, but there's a fine line between 'explanation' and 'excuse'. One way of looking at the first part of this post is as a simple retelling of what happened, the other is as a request for sympathy. I detest the latter. I neither want anyone to pity pledge, nor do I want anyone to fuss over me.

The combination of all this makes it very difficult for me to find the balance when it comes to keeping you informed. Less is often best, until the day when it isn't, at which point it's already too late and you need to explain a lot while being uncertain about things yourself. I'll try to do it better, but this is legitimately hard to do.



But anyway, there you have it about as short as I could make it. If you have questions, feel free to ask for a day or two, but please accept that I don't want to make my personal life a permanent feature here or on Discord.

My current pace of game development remains fairly erratic. It has been improving a lot and I'm positive about it long-term, but I do still have days where I suddenly realize I've been working on the same sentence for 3 hours. It is what it is at the moment.
I appreciate all your support much more than I usually let out.