Health Post Time (Patreon)

Hi everyone, I have some not so great news, and I feel at this stage it's no longer really viable to keep it a secret.

As you may recall, I was dealing with some health complications back in March and April that delayed a couple of builds. For a while, we thought it might have been COVID. I've had a couple of rebounds here and there, but the truth of it is that I'm still dealing with it and it's starting to look pretty bad.

I've had all kinds of tests done and have ruled out a whole lot of more mundane things, but now we're at the stage where we're looking for cancer. Some days, I'm better than others and can get a lot of work done. Other days, like today, I can hardly get out of bed.

We're very close to the end of the game. I have every intention of finishing it with the same level of detail and care that I started it with. I still have every intention of adding improvements and new features and fine-tuning everything and giving it a nice final coat of polish before the 1.0 release, hopefully on Steam and elsewhere.

But basically, the bottom line is that I don't know yet whether I'm going to live or die. If it's what all the symptoms are pointing to, the prognosis isn't usually great. Besides the physical symptoms and difficulty I'm having doing the work, I'm also struggling with the psychic toll of being afraid this could be the end. The doctors bills are adding up. It's a stressful time for virtually everyone on top of all this, between a global pandemic and mass protests filling up the streets. Some of the tests have to be sent out of state to the Mayo clinic, so it's a lot of waiting and fretting.

Trying to end this whole project with my brain like it is feels incredibly daunting, so I just want to ask for your understanding and patience while I grapple with all this. The lab visits, the specialists, the doctors appointments are getting more frequent and more all-consuming.  As it is, when I would like to be releasing my build this Friday, I'll instead be at the hospital having more followup ultrasounds done. I honestly don't know yet how this will effect the release schedule. I might have to be a little more flexible with my deadlines for a while. I might have had to anyway, since we're so close to the end.

I'm going to keep pecking away at this 1 day at a time for now, but I just want to be blunt: if I find out I'm not going to live for very long, this is not really how I plan to spend my last moments. If I found out the prognosis is good, or that it's completely treatable, it will be a huge psychic weight off my shoulders and I'll be much more motivated to give this ending my all.

The Patreon money is a real life-saver right now for Audrey and I, so to all of my supporters: thank you.

And thanks for reading. I want so bad to finish this game right. Stay safe and stay healthy out there.

- Nym