Update - 03/07/2023

Welcome to another update! I hope you all had a great weekend! I spent it working as usual, but I did have time to visit my mother to celebrate my sister's birthday, so that was a nice change of pace. 

As you can imagine, last week has been largely focused on playtesting Warlord Ascendant, as well as slowly completing its missing features. I'm fairly confident that I'll be done this week. Although there's the distinct possibility that I'll not be able, due to some really shitty situation: Phil has really disappeared for good this time. We've tried contacting him in all possible ways, but he's not answering. Since I've already lost yet another 2 months to this bullshit, it's time to move on. He's held the whole project back for a year, and although still really crappy, we are now in a position that we can move on without him. It's not that easy, mind you, because he was the one with the latest iteration of the files and since he never answered me and I honestly don't know how outdated is the last version of the master files he sent me. This means that I need to do some forensic work and try to find which changes were implemented and which ones weren't. 

Not only that, Phil is the only one who had the files for the player's reference and all the gameplay sheets. This means that I only have access to the screen-only versions. Since the idea was to print those out for the deluxe edition, we obviously cannot do that. So the only solution is to make them all again, from scratch. Considering I pay 100 bucks per sheet, and there are 9 of them (plus another 2 he never made but that we need), that's a lot of money. And that's without counting the reference manual, and the fact that I need to hire someone to implement the fixes the printer needs, because I honestly do not have a clue. So yeah, I'm screwed, again. I've had to do a lot of personal sacrifices and sell some stuff in order to pay the printer the first half of the payment, and it's all been because of Phil delaying the project. We've given him chance after chance, and to see him disappear when we are at the finish line, it's not only infuriating, but bizarre.

But this game must come out one way or another though, so starting today I'll need to focus completely on this until it's done. It's going to be a long week, but I hope it's all worth it once we're done. 

I have other, better news:

- itch.io has a summer sale going on, and both Broken Shores and Sacrifice can be grabbed at 50% of their original price. I know you guys don't care about this cause you already own them, but if anyone asks about those games, let them know!

- Geek Gamers is working on a video about Riftbreakers. I don't know if it will be only about Riftbreakers, but she's going through it right now and bombarding me with questions, so she seems to want to play it.

- I've signed a contract with the same Brazilian publisher who is releasing Sacrifice to release Riftbreakers and Broken Shores in Portuguese. So far I haven't seen any money but I see they're serious about my games because the process for the translation of Sacrifice was great and they're very respectful of the original design. 

- I should also be signing a contract soon to release Riftbreakers in Spanish. Seems like this is my most popular game! Although I don't know if it's pure coincidence or not, but since someone made a post on Reddit complaining about some of its systems I haven't sold a single copy, and that was almost 2 weeks ago. Considering that before that I was selling at least a couple of copies a day, I don't know if it's just me being paranoid or that the game has reached its peak audience for now.

So that's all for this week, I hope you all have a great one!