Update - Current Tentative Plans (Patreon)
Content
*Note- If you don't care about the sound issue stuff, at least skip to the bottom for an explanation why there currently isn't a third poll.
Alright, if you don't know what this is talking about, please go and read THIS POST which explains the clusterfuck I'm currently caught up in regarding sound replacement for Left Hand Magic.
After that post, I had to take a few days to try and sort out what to do, and I haven't yet come to any solid conclusions. After wrestling with the issue, I realized that one way or another I need more information, so to speak. I just flat out don't have a very good grasp on how time and energy intensive replacing all the moan tracks in the game with something more synched to the animations is going to be. This both means I can't estimate how long it would take me, if I do it myself, and I can't really try to hire someone else without a better grasp on what I'm asking of them.
Thankfully, I also realized that the fact I fully intended for half of this month to be finish/polish work anyway, leaves me with at least a little breathing room.
Currently, what I'm doing is effectively pushing hard to finish up the actual rendering work for new content that was planned for this month. I'm already done with the Harem Route Council Event, and the Epilogue shouldn't take more than a couple of days. After that, maybe 3-4 days more for finishing up the Arianna friends-with-benefits route I've promised.
If I push through all of it quickly, I figured from the start that I would be able to wrap up the rendering, programming, and even writing by around the 15th. Originally, my intentions for after that were to spend the rest of the month making all the improvements I needed. Better post processing in the early game, some replacement renders, a better looking menu and improved cheats system, improved sprites, another editing pass through the whole game. Etc. A lot of polish work to turn the game more professional looking work, essentially.
I've decided, since a certain amount of delay is going to be caused by this clusterfuck one way or another, that I'm going to hijack at least a few days of that to do some sound work myself. Essentially, spending those days trying to figure the answers to 'how hard is this actually.' This will allow me to make a better-informed choice between the options I outlined previously, going forward.
Here is the third poll absence explanation:
This decision is also what led to me delaying the 'Feedback/Focus' poll for this month. Depending on which option I go with for what to do about the sound issues, that poll may turn into Multiple Major Polls which will start selecting details about the next game I make.
A poll of some sort regarding that will appear, one way or another, but I need to sort out how time critical the answers I still need are first. Originally, I was going to run a whole series over November and December as I didn't intend to start work on even a tech demo until December (with a pause of the Patreon Page in November for LHM's release). Since the order of things is now a bit up in the air, I may instead be pushing to do several polls all at once to gather the remaining needed information so that I can start a tech demo in November...