On Restarting and Resuming Book 2 (Patreon)

Hello everyone, Parivir here.

It's been a very long time since I've been on Patreon or AMR's socials, and I deeply apologize for the prolonged absence. Rewriting AMR has turned out to be a much bigger creative challenge than I initially thought it would, and that's resulted in a lot of stutters in the game's development on my end, which I'll talk about as well in this update.

But before anything else, it seems prudent to be up front about AMR's future, and I'm happy (if sheepish) to say that I'm actively working on AMR full-time again. There have been a lot of changes made to the game's script, so much so that a majority of Book 2 will be rewritten from the ground up. But I'm a lot happier with the overall feel and direction of the story as it exists now, and I hope you will be as well.

To that end, I'll be releasing a free update a little after this post goes up, which consists of a full rewrite of the beginning of Book 2, amounting to over 30k words altogether. Of this, around 27k words are entirely new content, with the only things retained from the old demo being parts of Tahlia's introduction, as well as the dream sequence which allows you to reset your character's personality meters.

Henceforth, I'll be returning to a monthly update schedule, which will consist of rewrites for Book 2. Each update will consist of 20-25k words of new content; if anything has been carried over from the original demo, it will not be counted towards this wordcount goal.

All that being said, I'd like to apologize once more that the rewrite has taken so long, as well as for the overall lack of communication. My original vision for the rewrite mainly revolved around revising dialogues and MC's internal thoughts, so that the experience felt less consistently oppressive for those on the anti-Arcadia route. However, the more I worked on this, the more I found that the finished product fell short of what I wanted to deliver. Over the course of numerous rewrites, I realized that to achieve the overall direction I wanted, I would need to go beyond minor rewrites and actually build new scenes from the ground up to facilitate the change.

And so for the duration of my absence, I did a lot of trial and error with AMR, which wounded up extending the rewriting period far beyond my initial expectation. This also came with a slew of creative blocks (it's difficult to let go of so much content and remain totally productive T_T). Furthermore, taking a break from Patreon meant that I had to pick up part-time jobs in order to support myself and pay for my tuition, which also cut into the time I could spend working on AMR.

In the end, I was able to put together an overarching plotline for Book 2 that I liked a lot better than the original demo. A lot of the major plot points will be retained - things like the the Eli rescue and Blue Harvest arcs will definitely reappear in the revised version - but the framework and plot motivation surrounding them will be redone, such that even if your character isn't looking to align with Arcadia in that particular playthrough, there will still be reasons for them to participate in the plot beyond Tahlia just strong-arming them into things. I will talk more about the design philosophies adhered to in the rewrite in future devlogs, as it's a lot to cover all at once. But suffice to say, a lot has changed--in my opinion for the much better--and I'm excited to slowly unveil them as development progresses.

For a long time, I just couldn't be sure if I was going to be able to put out a version of AMR I'd be proud of in the near future, and the thought of conveying that uncertainty to everyone exacerbated the anxiety I felt about the rewriting project as a whole. As such, I wanted to wait until I could definitively come to a conclusion on AMR's future before laying it all out on the open. I'm really thankful for everyone who have been patient enough to see this project through to the other side, and I hope the final product will be something that will be worth the wait.

Over the course of the next few days, I'll be doing a lot of housekeeping for the Patreon, including things such as replying to your DMs and comments that have accumulated during the hiatus (I'm thankful that you still left them, even when the future of the project was uncertain. Thank you thank you thank you, and I'm sorry I wasn't able to respond to them until now). The next full update will come sometime in mid-May, at which point I will also resume Patreon charging. I also have a couple of A Murder of Gods artworks I commissioned prior to the hiatus, which will serve as the monthly rewards for May as I try to get the art side of things going once again.

Finally, I have had to manually pause Patreon billing every month for the past year, and on a couple of occasions I slightly missed the timing to pause, which meant that a few patrons were accidentally charged during the hiatus. Within the next few days, I will be messaging the relevant patrons to figure out a way to do a refund; in the off chance that I miss anyone, please don't hesitate to contact me via the Patreon message feature.

There were so many things I wanted to talk about that I'm sure I missed one or two, but I wanted to get this out sooner rather than later. As always, I have nothing but gratitude for your patience and understanding. And, for the first time in a long time, I thank you again for supporting the development of A Mage Reborn!