Month end progress report & end of year summary (Patreon)

Well, it's here, 2022 will be over in a few hours. You may be reading this post next year, not this year. It's been an adventurous year, I'll give it that. My life has been turned upside down, with some very dark thoughts in my head at the beginning of the year. And that's just my life, it's horrible to think that there's a war going on less than 400 kilometres from my home. And of course, my own country's domestic and foreign policy is would be worth a few words.

Unfortunately, the planned 3-4 chapters did not come together, which I regret. It was partly my fault, I made stupid decisions and stuck to them in a stupid way. And, of course, there are the repeatedly mentioned external causes, that I would have preferred to avoid. I hope it won't be like this for a while, but if 2022 has taught me anything, it's that nothing is certain.

Anyway, never mind the politics for now. This is not the medium to deal with it. And the rest is in the past. I learned from it, then I got over it. What is important here and now is Rise of the Crime Lord and Distant Horizon. Let's start with the latter, whose development is progressing nicely. As I've written before, and I will stress this many times, it will consist of smaller updates than Rise. Much, much smaller updates. Especially at the beginning. You may be able to complete one or two of them in 10-20 minutes.  But thanks to this, I can check in more often and do more updates in advance, so I can release new updates when I'm already working on Rise full steam ahead.

As for Rise, although I had planned to relax before the new chapter, as usual it didn't work out. From the notes, the story is coming together. At night, for example, I woke up at one in the morning and couldn't sleep for a couple of hours, so I was thinking about the game. The result of which was that I rethink the beginning of the chapter a bit, which I think made it better. But there's also progress on other fronts, the details of the Rick-Ashley(-Miranda) hike, the Rick-Cora trip, they're all well underway. So, I'll probably start the actual writing soon. There are still some questions, especially about the Cora-Daniel, Cora-Miri and Cora-Beth pairings, and I still need to work out the current stage of the Cora-Argay relationship (which is quite influenced by who Cora takes with her). But these stages are starting to become clearer.

Meanwhile, I have almost all the characters "ready", by which I mean that I'm slowly putting together what everyone will wear in the various scenes. The number is already impressive, with 36 outfits for 10 characters. In the meantime, I've redesigned Reginald Argay a bit, changing his beard, because I had a lot of problems with the previous one, it needed a lot of reworking. (It's not the first time, in Chapter 8, for example, I changed his hair because, when Argay was in the sun, the original version looked like he was wearing a plastic potty.)

And that number is only going to grow, as this chapter features a lot of characters, including long-unseen characters like Judit and Jess, who we last saw in Chapter 8. Come to think of it, I don't think any chapter has ever featured so many:

Rick

Cora

Ashley

Miranda

Judit

Sam

Rachel

Kendra

Beth

Jess

Nicole (although she only makes a cameo)

Jake

Terence

Daniel

Reginald Argay

And Claire joins as a new episode cast member

Of course, who Rick and Cora meet depends largely on decisions made earlier and during Chapter 10. What's more, in the new chapter, Cora may make a decision that could further strengthen or worsen her marriage, and Rick could permanently ruin his relationship with two characters.

So, Rise is evolving, there's no stopping it, there's been no break. I can't seem to shut my brain off. But for now, this is all you'll get for this game, and there'll be more stuff from Distant Horizon, as I'll have more tangible stuff to show you there. Okay, I could take a picture of my notebook, but I don't think there's much you could do with the illegible text in Hungarian. :)

Well, that's all for now. Be well, take care of yourselves and your loved ones and... Well, in the next post, at midnight.