TL;DR: Being a dev is hard and unpredictable, trying predict things is impossible, but it's not for lack of trying. For better or worse, the bulk of the update will be ready for the Steam release. Just with some minor ticks missing (character menu being the biggest), but nearly everything should be in working order.
Just to clarify where I'm at for the sake of transparency:
- Render Prep is 99.9% done. Still have a half-dozen or so, which I may forgo for this update as they aren't important.
- Of the nearly 2200 renders prepped/ready to go, there's 700 or so fully rendered.
- All animations are fully rendered and done. They just need to be imported into a video editor and exported as a webm.
- Writing is currently in-progress. Writing for 2200 renders is going to take a bit, but I feel like I'm making pretty good progress with it. I have no doubt I'll finish with time to spare (and give to proofreaders.)
Where the pause comes in, and is the reason for pushing the date, is the smaller stuff. Adding the achievements (for Steam), the walkthrough (which I'm doing as I'm writing.), postwork, adding and slotting in the music (along with crediting said artists.), and the bigger one being the character menu. For the character menu, I'm thinking of adding it a bit later in a more rounded mid-cycle update that'll hopefully bring some fixes to other lingering issues. Leaving the character menu alone for now, would certainly allow more time to get other things done, and as soon as the update goes out, I'll start working on the mid-cycle update to get those fixes ready.
There's a lot of little stuff to do, and little stuff piles into bigger tasks. Which is only compounded by working a full time job and not being able to afford handing smaller stuff off to someone else. So, there's kind of a balancing act happening of trying to be transparent and get the best product out as quick as possible without overpromising. But being solo with full time work, and the fact that anything can happen at any time (e.g. hardware issues), it's sometimes easy to think about a potential date without thinking about everything else happening in your life.
The beef of the work here is the writing and finding enough music to be able to slot them in without looping too much. Postwork, crediting, achievements, and so forth really shouldn't take all that long by themselves.
