The beta is out!

Hi, guys. The update is out. Phew! This update turned out the longest, while it was planned to be the fastest. 😓 But I'm happy to finally show what I did. I sent links to all patrons and to all who wanted to participate in beta.

Let's start with where I was missing for 13 days straight because I owe you an explanation and apology. Simply put, I decided to go silent and just finish everything. I admit it is irresponsible and childish on my part. I just felt that I don't have neither the time nor will to respond to messages. I really felt guilty and at this point, everything I could say would sound ridiculous. But I put myself in this position, overestimating my abilities and saying wrong deadlines, so I'm the one to blame. I'm sorry about that. I'll do my best so that such  thing wouldn't happen again in the future.

Anyway, here is the result of these months in detail:

I made 8 events and other small interactions. It sounds insignificant for 7 months, I know. Why did it take me so long?

In this update, I just beat the record in the amount of written text. This update has about 250-300 pages and each event is almost 40 pages(some events much bigger, some events smaller).

The same with pictures. I made about 700 pictures. It is much more than I have ever had in any updates I released before.

So I can't say that the update turned out small, it just looks small in comparison to the time I spent on it. (I think it would be much better just to release 3-4 events every month, 100-150 pictures and 100 pages in total. But what's done is done.)

So, your feedback is very important and here the points I want you to examine carefully:

1. There is a lot of texts in the events and I want to know if you liked that.
2. There are a lot of pictures in the events. There are new emotions for almost every place in the story. Some people pointed out before that I poorly implement emotions sometimes and I also noticed that. So in this update I tried to improve that and spent a lot of time on it. I want to know if you noticed the difference. And tell me if you like it or not?
3. To make such big events was an experiment. I had a lot of ideas and a lot of passion at first. But with each month my efficiency  was getting worse. I realized that working on big events is 10 times harder than working on small ones. I want to know your opinion if it was worth the effort? So your feedback on this is very important.

I strongly feel that instead of huge 8 events, I could do 20 regular events that are smaller( 10-15 pages, 30-40 pics) and it would take a smaller amount of time. I'm wondering if that would be better? I have a certain opinion about that, but before making any conclusions I want to know your opinion first. Did you like new events and how big they are? (First updates have 6-10 pictures for one event and about 4-5 pages of text and nobody complained too much about it. 🤔So think about it carefully. )

About changelog: I'll make a changelog when I will release the public version. Remember that your old saves starting from v0.30 are SUPPOSED TO WORK!

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I'm done with the most important stuff. Now I'll just ramble some more about the problems I had doing the update and what I think I should do in the future.

First and foremost, I want to explain briefly why this last finishing touch took me so long:

Overestimation of my abilities. I wanted to release this update as fast as I could and to motivate myself to do this, I made once again an extremely short deadline, which I thought was theoretically possible. I didn't estimate the right amount of time I would need.

And then again I couldn't bring myself to release an unfinished update, while I see that just a little bit and everything will be ready.

As I explained before, I had problems with translators. I didn't want you to bring bad news until I sorted it all out, but the new ones that I had to hire instead of my old translator weren't good enough so I was working on improving and fixing their mistakes. Some things I had to retranslate myself so that characters would  talk how they should. Text in my native language is really complex and it's hard for translators to convey characters in the way I intended. It turned out to be a challenge to find a good translators with a fixed budget in a short amount of time. I hurried with this too much and got not really good ones.

Another mistake is that while the translation was in progress, I decided to add more pictures and texts. I didn't even notice how fast time had passed. When I got the translation back, the new texts and pictures weren't finished and rendered. Instead of releasing no matter what, I, again, wanted to finish everything.

This all sounds like excuses and you have all right to consider them excuses. The result is that I worked slow and ineffective. It's my fault. It's not the translators' fault and not the fault of something else. I understand this.

All this wouldn't feel like such a big problem if I:

1. Wouldn't overestimate myself over and over. (I tried to overpromise and overdeliver, but failed at it. Make people frustrated. So I don't deserve to do that for now.)
2. Communicate with you guys better, and explaining everything in more detail. (At the end of the finishing update, I already didn't care about anything except finishing it. So as a result I communicated poorly with you.)

What I will change:

1)The most important thing I'll start to do differently is how I will handle communication with you and how I'll tell you about the progress of the update. From now on I'll set certain goals and will inform you about % amount of every goal.

2) I won't tell any more deadlines until I will get back on track with the consistent updates. (Eventually impossible deadlines will be back, don't worry. 😈)

3) Of course, I will set a deadline for myself, I just won't tell you. Instead, I'll be telling you what I plan to do exactly. And not for how long I'll be doing it.
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But! Just want to clarify that all these problems didn't make me less interested in the game or anything, don't worry about it. Instead, I feel really excited and motivated to prove to you that I can do better!

P.S. I'm really tired after finishing the update. So I'll answer your questions and feedback and then I'll take 3 days off because I need to replenish my mana.

P.S.S. I didn't forget about wallpapers. I'll make a post about it in 3 days, I think.

P.S.S.S. Write to me if I forget to send you a beta version!