Happy Saturday everyone! Hope you all are doing well. :) This will be a longer dev update than usual, so you are warned in advance!
I'll start with the most important thing: Chapter 23 is on track for release on July 31st. I'm just past halfway done with rendering scene 5 of 6, so everything is going as expected. :) I've been having more problems with Daz than usual, which have eaten up lots of time (like having to fully uninstall/reinstall, or having to run 60 renders one at a time by hand), but I've managed to get through it all relatively unscathed. If you're ever wondering whether or not you should use Daz for a long-term video game project, the answer is almost assuredly no.
On a personal/professional note - I'm leaving my IRL job at the end of this upcoming week. Since I started work on Price of Power, I've been working a full-time job + game dev on nights and weekends. It's been quite exhausting, especially at the position I've been at for the last ~two years. Two hours of commuting per day, eight hours of work, then squeezing in game development work once home has not been the easiest. 60-70 hour weeks have been the norm for the last three years, and burnout has definitely started to set in over the last few months. So, to fix that, I'm leaving that IRL job...
To do game development full-time! Thanks to your support, I've been able to save up a decent bit of money - enough to let me take a stab at being a full-time game developer (for the near/medium-term). I've got about 24 months to make this all work, so I'm hopeful that you'll all be able and willing to keep supporting me as I try to make this into my one and only job! I know I regularly thank you all for your support already, but I really do appreciate it; without everyone who supports this game, I couldn't even take this chance. So, thank you for enabling this, and I promise to do my best with this opportunity. :)
Once I've taken some time to recover from constant 60-70 hour weeks and waking up at 5 in the damn morning, I'll be working on PoP full-time until I've gotten all 30 chapters done. :) The current development roadmap is still what I'm working towards, but as I get into the groove of working on PoP when I'm not exhausted/sleep-deprived, I may tweak and accelerate it. At the current pace/plan, Chapter 30 should be done in around a year, hopefully less once I get into the hang of things. I don't want to go too aggressive on timelines right now and end up putting out a rushed finale right after I say that I'm focusing on game development. So, no changes to the dev roadmap until I can properly recover, reassess everything, and finish this game off in the way it deserves. :)
I'm sure some of you are wondering what happens after PoP, if I'm doing this full time and only have a year or so left. I don't want to give too much away, but I can confidently say that I've got a game 2 in mind that I'm already deep in the ideation stage of creating. It'll still be 10-12 months until PoP is finished and I can focus on game 2, but I've already got a pretty clear vision of what that'll look like. Let's just say that if you like wholesome fantasy romances (and if you're here, I assume you do), you'll probably like this game. :) I won't be straying from my roots, but I want to do everything I did in PoP better. More player agency, more gameplay mechanics, better renders (hopefully using a better tool than Daz), etc. - it's all on the table and I'll be working towards that as I close PoP out and prepare for the future.
Thanks for reading, and thank you again for making this all possible!