Just a little life update

Sorry for being late - I know I usually put up notices about this sort of thing somewhere before I leave, but I was out of town for the last week helping family. I just got back and am trying to settle back into getting some development work done, but there's obviously a lot going on right now.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, go to the public release post for v0.22 - all the info you could possibly want is there.

In the all-too-short week since then, some have been trying to throw others under the bus, some have been caught in lies, some have gone into hiding or started playing the victim, but my main take-away from the whole thing is how grateful I am for all the support. Both from all of you as my Patrons, but from everyone supporting the community as a whole. It is genuinely amazing to see.

I've never broken any of these ill-defined and arbitrary rules, and even after the goal-posts continue to move, I still don't break any of the new ill-defined and arbitrary rules. Which makes it that much more terrible that I was still faced with a version of reality that would have made continuing development borderline impossible.

And I'm still one of the lucky ones. I personally know hundreds of developers that went through the same thing I did. I know at least a dozen that weren't breaking the rules before but suddenly are and now have to figure out how to weather the blow to their livelihood because we weren't given any warning about these rule changes. I even know a couple that have been de-platformed despite being in my position - they weren't breaking any rules before, and they aren't breaking any rules now.

What frustrates me the most is that all of this ultimately comes down to the thing I care about the least - money.

Some of you are mindbogglingly generous with me, and I will appreciate that until I'm no longer capable of the act of appreciation. Even those of you that just kick me a few bucks here and there make a difference that I'm incredibly grateful for.

Unfortunately, money is what makes the world go 'round, and like everyone else, I need it to be able to continue forward.

The last thing I want to do is stop making games. For my entire life, making games is what I've wanted to do. I love building these worlds and filling them with characters and writing out the story, and I'll keep doing it until it's no longer an option. Even if it means I have to change my strategy on how I make games.

I'm still debating with myself exactly how I want to change things, but it's obvious now that I need to put more of an emphasis on monetization, because it could be any given month that these goal posts get moved again and I get taken down despite not breaking any rules, and those are terrifying conditions to work under.

I still want to be fair to those of you who support me, even if you're in the free follower tier, so I will at minimum be giving fair warning before anything changes. You will know exactly what is changing, along with how and when. To start with - Maids & Masters will be finished first. Nothing will change before v1.0. Once I have a more concrete plan, changes will be announced a minimum of a month before they're implemented.

For the short term, I'll be sitting down and hashing out exactly what I want to do with the affection quests. I thought I had most of what I wanted to do written down, but after going through all of my notes while I was out of town, I couldn't find hardly anything. Just the vague intentions rattling around in my head. Hopefully having everyone's arcs written down will help streamline development and you'll be looking at v0.23.2 in a couple weeks and we'll be back to something vaguely resembling normal.