August 15 Update (Patreon)

First, an assortment of amiable amusements:

Check out the comic above! For this one, my goal was to write a comic with zero dialogue and no punchline. I hope it makes you smile. ^-^ Also, you can consider it canon that something like this happened at some point.

Speaking of Annikath's work, she created a Patreon. Though my patrons will get access to all her TLS work, you may be able to get sneak previews of a few images there, plus her original work. There's also a drawing for free art among early patrons!

If you do Twitter, please consider retweeting the promotional picture Crescentia did for Once Ever After. This has made a measurable impact on Steam wishlists, so it would be nice if it gets more exposure. Though it may be a bit late for this one, there could be future promotions across platforms.

That said, the main topic of this week's post is about timing decisions. Deciding exactly how I apportion my time and schedule projects is essential for productivity, but as we get later in the year, some priorities start to conflict without easy solutions.

Thanks to some helpful patrons, I've gotten the Newgrounds demo for OEA in basically stable shape (it's still available if any patrons want to try it out as a reward). It would have made sense to put it out this weekend, but I decided to delay it because I felt the time commitment (though not huge) would distract me from TLS.

Though I believe that to be the best decision in the long term, it does put OEA at risk of further delays. Nobody responded regarding a map build, but I will need to put in a significant chunk of time to create the final version, then we'll require testing and time on the Steam upcoming list. The problem is, the end of the year is dominated by AAA releases, then the Winter and Chinese New Year sales on Steam are terrible times to release a game. I don't like the idea of delaying the release until early 2022, but since the alternative is a rushed release, I guess that's the decision I need to make.

TWC3 is also complete and I need to decide both on its exact release date and whether I do any more RoyalRoad chapters. Ugh, that's a decision I'm actually putting off, and can't for very long. Very much an energy drain vs marketing question.

Anyway, those are my current thoughts. I hope that this delay leads to increased TLS productivity, instead of regret I didn't use this time to clear out lower energy activities, but work continues and the plan has not changed.