Progress Update (May 2023)

Hi all! I wanted to give everyone an update on progress, both in terms of the game and my personal life. This starts out sounding like bad news but take heart, it's not.

Progress this month has been slower than usual and I realized a few days ago it was major burn out. One on hand, it's kind of amazing that this project has been going for more than two years. In almost every way, that's hugely exciting. Not only in terms of my personal growth with telling the story and putting together the images for it, but also the growth of this community, both here on Patreon as well as Discord.

But, my personal progress on the game really slowed down about a month ago. A lot of that is this new job I started last year. BBN started and remains a hobby that I do in my spare time, but I had a lot of spare time at my previous job, which only required about 3 hours of work per day. In contrast, this new job requires my full attention and for the first few months left me mentally and emotionally exhausted as I was drowning in information, new policies, procedures, and so on.

Trying to stay 100% on top of this new job and maintain a relatively consistent workflow with BBN had resulted in some hard core burn out. For two years, almost all of my free time that wasn't devoted to my family was going to BBN. No games, no movies, no tv shows. I was even telling my son I couldn't play games with him because I had to "work" (on BBN). When that was compounded with having much less time in the day due to the new job, it left me exhausted, a bit depressed and all kinds of guilty, either for not spending time with my son or not spending time on BBN.

So, this month was not as productive as I try to be, but that's why. I desperately needed some time for myself and my family. And I've done that.

After talking through some issues with my husband and thinking about how to best manage this going forward, I'm resolved to aim to dedicate about an hour a day to work on BBN, with a couple nights or days off each week. By scheduling time for BBN rather than just trying to squeeze it in ad hoc whenever I have a free moment, I think this is going to be more manageable and less oppressive.

And... I made some great progress last night. When I sat down and started my usual playlist, instead of feeling worn out and unable to focus, I was back to feeling energized and excited about what I was putting together. I'm down to about 400 lines of dialogue to work through, which is actually pretty manageable, and I'll share some sneak peek images with Patrons soon.

I'm sorry for the lack of updates over the last couple of weeks but wanted to explain why and also that I'm feeling better now and am excited about finishing up this chapter and getting it to you as soon as I can.

Cheers,

BBN