Ummmm...uh-oh?

Since I don't want them to get lost in the shuffle. There are release posts for the Cyberworld and Steamworld comics, for the $20 and $10 tiers respectively,

That said, I ran into a somewhat critical problem, very unexpectedly. And wanted to let everyone know what was going on as soon as possible. I was actually doing some very minor early testing (I'd just completed a desperately needed overhaul to the Character Menu images), and thank the almighty I did that, or I wouldn't have noticed this until a day or two before release. Essentially, what I know so far is that in early January the dumb fucks that make the Visual Novel Maker engine decided to force an update via Steam, which is where I bought their software package from. I'd been avoiding updates for VNM like the plague, due to all the unstable issues I've had with their software. I had Chastity Quest stable, more or less, and I didn't want to risk anything breaking.

They didn't give me a choice, sadly.

Since this wasn't optional any longer, I updated...and I thought everything was okay. Until, that is, I went to test the alterations I'd made to improve the character menu. It was a pretty simple set of changes, really just an update to the images used so that they don't look like total ass any longer. Imagine my surprise when I tried to load a save I'd just made, only for an error to pop up and the game to crash O.O. That was...only the beginning of a multi-hour frustrating experience that I'm just now on the other end of. I managed, eventually, to fix the save-load issue by updating to one of their beta builds. Unfortunately...that's caused another MAJOR problem.

It unlinked every single image and video in the entire project.

Visual novel maker uses a rather bullshit resource manager (the entire reason that I've been unable to make patches for new builds up to now, actually). They supposedly fixed it in the fancy new update so that you didn't need to load in every image/video/etc via that resource manager. That...would be nice. I was looking forward to that, even if the update scared me. Unfortunately, the dipshits apparently broke something in the project migration, and now every single image that's pointed to in a scene anywhere...isn't actually doing that. Technically, I can totally fix this manually. All I'd have to do is...go into every single scene, one at a time, and re-link 1700+ images and 300+ video clips...

Yeah, I REALLY DON'T WANT TO DO THAT. 

So, right now, as things stand, I have a message in with their support team, hoping there is a known way to fix this. However, my past experience with getting support for this thing has been, frankly, nightmarish. So, let me get down to brass tacks here.

What does this mean for Chastity Quest? 

In the long run? Absolutely nothing. Even if they don't get back to me or they don't have a solution when they do, I can and will fix this the hard way. It's only a matter of time.

In the short run? This means that, for reasons utterly beyond my control, the February update is probably going to be smaller than intended. Not by a lot, 30 of the 35 scenes are/were already completed. However, in reaction to this massively sweeping of a problem, I immediately put a stop to plans to do those additional 5 scenes. If, by some miracle, they get back to me with a quick solution, I may restart work on those. Right now, however, I'm given absolute priority to fixing this issue.

Later today, I'll be shifting gears to hammer out all the editing that I normally wouldn't have started yet. That will take a day or two, which should hopefully be enough time for the support people to get back to me with some sort of information. Depending on what/if I hear from them, I'll either have a fix and can shift back to trying to add at least a couple of additional scenes...or I'll be faced with the need to go through 2000+ images across 200+ and dozens of other locations, making manual changes. In which case, I'll be focusing hard on doing that as fast and as completely as possible, with the goal being to make the end of the month deadline if at all physically possible.

The WORST case scenario is that there is no fix, and that it takes me longer than I have before end-of-month to get through that many instances manually. In which case, in the worst-case scenario, the game may see a couple of days of delay. I apologize for this. This is genuinely something that I couldn't have planned for and wasn't the root cause of, but that doesn't keep me from feeling like I'm letting you all down if this causes a smaller build size or a delayed release :-(.