It's very tricky...
Both VelcroFist and I are loving putting Casey's Fall together, and it truly makes my day to see people are enjoying our Visual Novel. However, ever since I started working on this game, my day-to-day life schedule got really messy. I'm trying to fix this.
I thought making smaller releases over a shorter schedule would solve this issue, but based on these past few weeks I can say that it only made the work more straining.
- selecting and preparing assets, characters and environments is a step that can take some time
- the plot, even though it's being inspired by a complete erotica, needs to be adapted and the alternative paths need to be planned out.
- making the renders involves a lot of back and forth and work getting redone/tweaked
- I like to study DAZ (the render framework we use to make the images), I want to have some time to go over tutorials to get better at it too, but lately I haven't been able to. All my "DAZ time" has been straight up dedicated to make renders for the game.
- fix and improvements over the work from previous releases is also a thing I want to constantly do
Other than the regular 9 to 5 job, I've found that a scary majority of my free-time for these past several weeks has been used working on the game, this schedule is not maintainable. It caused me to pretty much stop doing my other hobbies, which is not ideal.
I trying to find a sweet spot in which people can get enough updates to be engaged, while keeping a good amount of time that isn't work or casey's-fall-related for myself and VelcroFist to do other things.
If we keep a schedule like we've been for these past several weeks, I'm positive I'll burn out soon.
I don't want the project to die.
I hope people reading this won't think I'm being a downer or anything like that, I'm having a pretty positive and hopeful view for the future, I think it's just a matter of adapting and finding a development strategy that works fine and is maintainable.
As I mentioned before, we're learning as we go.
In regards to your comment, Joe, I really like the idea of 2 time frames, the first being larger than the second, that's neat. We might try that out.
I really appreciate your closing words too. Thanks <3