Novus
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Sitrep for July
🕑 Added 2025-07-09 19:26:13 +0000 UTCAlright, folks, this is more of a situation report than a progress report for a couple of reasons. First, of course, is that the polls are still ongoing. Second, however is because of the reason things were delayed at the end of the last build.
Bluntly put, I crashed hard after 6+ months of pushing myself beyond sane working limits trying to get Left Hand Magic done on my original self-imposed deadline. Which, much to my frustration, would have been the game being totally done new content wise this month, with next month only being for refinement and release. Obviously, despite how hard I pushed? I'm going to need more time than that.
The extreme aggravation of that, added to some medical issues adding to the stress, and then also finding out that the Sound Guy whose been working on improving the game sound for me had a hardware failure causing the loss of all the work he'd done so far? (He had, in fact, nearly finished doing sound for both all the animations along Trix and Talia's entire routes). All of that hit in rapid succession and I hit a point where I just flat couldn't keep going for a few days, which pushed the game to be delayed three days into July in turn.
Unfortunately, I'm still not exactly in a good physical or mental place at the moment. I desperately need to dial it back a bit this month, to allow myself to breath, even if the idea of doing so sort of gives me panic attacks all on it's own. I've been working out exactly how to strike a balance of making enough progress not to panic over the lack of progress, while also not slowly killing myself from overwork and stress. The result I've settled on for July is as follows:
This month, my first focus is going to be on completing the remaining animations that need redone. I've already been working on this, having redone an additional two animations while I was working this all out. As it happens? That means there are only three such animations redos left. Those animations need to get redone sooner or later, and they are honestly fairly low-stress for me to work on. Better yet, by being able to just flat out check that box off, I'll be able to spend more time in future updates on the new content. I've been spending 3-4 days at the start of every month working on redoing animations since, like, December of last year.
The downside to this approach, in addition to me forcing myself to stick to a slightly less intense schedule, is that the New Content for the month will be a bit less than the last couple of updates. There will still be new content. At the absolute minimum, I expect to be able to finish Harem Route Week 4 and get the previous Gallery content I skipped put in. But I'm not commixing to anything beyond that just yet. Not between the late start and me trying to take it easier.
If things go well, than there might be another day or two beyond that of new content pushing into Week 5. But I'm not going to stress over it (or, well, I'm going to try to not stress over it). By getting more of the re-do content completely crossed off, possibly even starting on fixing some of the early-game stills as well, I'll be setting future builds up to be larger on the new content side anyway. As is, I'm honestly hoping that my new deadline for release, which I'm putting as hopefully October currently, holds up -_-. I'm hoping to finish all new content by the end of September, with October only being final polish and the actual Steam release.
Note, all other rewards should be unaffected. In fact, with me easing off on grinding at Left Hand Magic so hard, they will likely be easier to work into the schedule.
Comments
Novus
Thank you :-). I deeply appreciate those of you who stick around, instead of jumping in and out at random. It's greatly helpful for my sanity and I do my best to make sure what you guys get is worth it!
Bababbak
I wish you lots of rest and a good recovery! You have been my favourite source of lewd content in the last few years, and so far you have always delivered to an exacting standart. If you need to take some time off, please do so. :) Personally, i will support you as long as my financial situation allows it.
Novus
He's not, but he's completely puzzled over what the hell happened. He had the original recordings from the VA he worked with for moan tracks copied into two separate places. Completely standard policy for him to make a backup when he first removes it off the recording equipment. But when he went to show me his work by exporting the files from premier, the original sounds files were corrupted. So he went to the backups to copy them from there...only to discover that those were corrupted in the exact same way. He apparently spent something like five hours trying to recover them by any means he could think of and came up blank. He's completely baffled and copying everything off that drive now because just about the only possibility is a progressive memory corruption of some sort. Note, you're also INSANELY lucky if you've never had an SSD fail. I've had 4 separate SSD failures in under 10 years, two externals and two internal m.2 drives. I've had maybe five or six flash drives fail in twenty years or so. That's even with a refusal to buy anything but the best drives on the market. As for data recovery...it's actually nearly impossible off of SSD's. It worked in ye olden days off of physical drives because the sectors hadn't been physically overwritten yet. SSDs don't work that way, their memory blanking out after deletion rather than waiting until someone else writes over that spot on the disk.
Merlin
Unless your sound guy is running a truly ancient system (or did not bother to save) he should be able to recover everything. Even with an internal drive, I can do that in less than an hour. For you, this should be able to remove at least one layer of stress. I have never had a SSD failure in over 20 internal and external SSD's and that is not even counting thumb drives. I can even recover data back to the mid 1990's on any other drive that has not completely failed a long time ago. Those old drives might be a pain but it can be done. In the future, he should backup every day (or more). This can be done, even on a cheap thumb drive which can hold thousands of songs and sound files. This will only take minutes. Sound files are small.
