Before I go into details let me make something clear, it's not that the game is bad or broken exactly. It's more that upon release, based on what people have said they expect and how the game has been presented. As things are Our Apartment may disappoint people on the initial launch, not meeting expectations set. Not simply expectations by what I've shown, but of the genre in general.
Also I'm sorry this announcement is coming so late, this realization kinda hit me hard and I had to sit on it a bit to figure out what to do. I also needed to get some work done to prepare for those changes.
So that said, the Steam release of Our Apartment won't come until next year. Considering the changes needed and time for those changes, it simply won't be ready by any acceptable release window this year.
What's missing
This is the key point, what's missing. And when talking with the publisher and other people what's missing is a sense of progression. And while it is sort of there it's long been background. In my mind these things weren't quite necessary at least for Early Access. They're there, but compartmentalized, and largely hidden.
I did this to try to stay within the boundaries of what's feasible development wise. More global use would require more conditions to be factored, more balancing, more play throughs, more programming, more testing. This might have been over caution.
But originally Our Apartment was supposed to be a "trainer" game. And still the reality is Our Apartment presents itself as a "trainer" game and is likely generally expected to be a trainer game. Not a VN with scattered compartmentalized sim and trainer elements. And both as the release was planned, and as the release would have been betrays that perception.
Additionally, my plan to scale back for the initial EA release to start in Act 4 further betrays the perception of the game.
I can understand if people are disappointed, I know I said I would announce a proper specific release date soon. And I fully had intention to do that, and pushing the release back is one of the harder things I've had to accept. But hopefully people will see it's for the best.
Cause releasing it as it is, and not meeting expectations even in early access could legitimately harm the project long term. And the game may never become what it is intended to be or what people want it to be.
What's being done
I know before I talked a lot about content and I actually did meet most of those goals. The main goal missed was having the game start from the beginning. But even if I pulled that off as intended this delay would have happened regardless.
So besides those goals, the major focus is bringing progression elements to the forefront and making them more global. Bringing more importance to daily events and other sim elements. As I said we already had some of this, some progression in sex sim, stuff like blow job training evolving over time. But now these elements will inter-connect more.
Before basically no stats were visible, only the results of those stats, so we'll have to add that. And overall this will be done with the goal of having a more objective and tangible progression than just story progression.
And if you read that and think "wait that wasn't already there" then all the more reason to hold off on this release. If not, then maybe for now consider getting the game on Itch.io .
Conclusion
Hopefully this brings some clarification to the delay. Once again I'm sorry for all this, For now the release is planned for 2022 and no further details will be given until a release range is for certain.
I wish I could be more specific, but that's just not a good idea for now. If you want to follow development consider [url=]following on my (sacb0y)[/url] or Momoirosoft twitter, the game page on itch, or the discord which I also run polls and do other things for feedback.