Monday Update #76 | Some content, some downtime. (Patreon)

Two weeks have passed and here I'm back with another Monday Update. I have some things to say so let's just get into it.Everything new:

I finished the polishing of the dialog from 0.8.1 and 0.8.2.

And I made the little changes to the early game that I talked about, trying to give Robin some personality back.

I've also started working on the new content and have finished the first big event that took a surprisingly large amount of renders and animations.

Meanwhile I'm almost done with the first animation of the update. I'm probably gonna release a little teaser on Discord and Twitter in the next few days.

I also implemented fixes for little bugs that were reported to me.

On top of that I also remade the banner for Itch.Io and F95Zone to be a bit more interesting, at least in my opinion.

And, I also took some time off. Just playing Elden Ring.

As some of you might remember I recently took a week off to visit family in a different part of germany. The first time away from my computer for more than one or two days in the last three years. It felt a bit weird and I was unreasonably afraid of a gamebreaking evil bug suddenly appearing and completely ruining the game for everyone while I wouldn't be able to fix it, but of course that didn't happen. Instead what happened is that I had a pretty good time and was really relaxed. Way too relaxed. I haven't felt that calm in years...

A week later I was back home and the calmness was gone. Immediately. My taxes annoy me, insurance annoys me even more, whenever I'm not working I just lay around don't knowing what to do, I order way too much takeout even though cooking is actually one of my hobbies and I even felt a bit out of touch with the game recently. I wasn't able to focus as usual and my sense for pacing and timing where out of whack and... I think...  I am overworked guys.

For some of you this is probably not very surprising, same for me if I'm honest. But it still took a loooong time to really sink in. The past three years I spent every single day pushing myself to improve my skills further and further. And the effort paid off. If you compare my old work to what I'm doing now it's pretty obvious how far I've come. But constantly working at my limits is tiring. And my batteries finally ran out. So I made a decision. I need to make some changes and I want to let you guys know what they are.First of all. Things aren't really so bad. I'm not taking about a clinical burnout here. I'm just tired. The development of MIST won't be slowing down. There is no need to. MIST isn't the reason I'm tired. The reason I'm tired is because I'm always pushing myself to grow and that has to stop. At least for a while. I think the quality of my graphics and of the game in general is good enough to relax for the moment and just develop with the skills I already have. Especially because I've already improved in many areas past the level of what you know from MIST, but because I'm obviously not gonna remake the entire game you're gonna have to wait for the future to see that but... That is a different story.My point is that I need to take things a bit slower. MIST is gonna be developed like usual and I'm gonna be learning new stuff like as always, but I'm not gonna be trying to push myself like a maniac anymore. That also means in the case that I need to decide between pulling an allnighter or releasing an update a day later I'm gonna be choosing a day later from now on. That is all from me for this week.

I hope you have a good week! You're gonna hear from me again in two weeks, and I'm also gonna be writing another Devlog sometime soon. Until then, stay safe!