Learning is not easy even under ideal circumstances. UE updates regularly, and each update brings new features that make development easier overall but require significant reworking on my end. This image became possible only recently, because Unreal did not support my face animation capture equipment until recently -- but the same update that added that support also broke something that took significant time to replace.
Game dev takes longer than I ever planned for, but that's why I released to early access. I suppose I should update the store page to reflect this new outlook, but I still think that the game will reach 1.0 status in about a year, even though that's exactly what I thought over a year ago. My tools evolve so quickly that I often think I could have spent less time and effort overall on certain features by just waiting for Epic to give them to me.
For anyone interested in the details of what I've been doing:
I bought a Steam Deck and have gotten the game running on it. Unless a new device raises the floor of what the market considers to be reasonable hardware requirements, I'm targeting the Steam Deck as the bare minimum. I'd likely continue to do so even if that does happen, so long as the Deck proves able to deliver.
I've been refactoring my code base with an eye toward forward compatibility with Unreal Engine's evolution, because I've had my progress stalled too many times by the need to drastically rework something to make the game compatible with the latest version. I could always just pick a version and stick with it, but so far it's been less effort to just let Epic keep solving my problems for me, and that's with the effort of reworking included.
Lots of design, prototyping, and experimentation that doesn't translate well to announcements on Steam. One benefit of being a lone developer is that I don't need to create slide shows and storyboards to communicate my vision to the programming team, because I am the programming team.
All I have left to do to complete the "Appearance" update mentioned in the previous announcement is figure out how to incorporate Epic's Metahumans with what I've already done. Unfortunately, this entails more refactoring.