Hey lovely people! I’m so sorry for the wait.
For the sake of transparency, here’s a breakdown of what’s been going on since the last release status update.
December
As I mentioned in the last update, I moved offices on the 15th of December, which is to say me and my wife moved to a new place, since our lease was up. I don’t actually have a separate office somewhere, I work from home, but it seems appropriate to call it that, given the context.
I was supposed to have an internet connection on the 20th of December, but there was a mix up at the post office, which made the delivery guy send my modem back to the ISP, assuming it was sent to the wrong address. I called the ISP on 3 separate occasions, until I figured out what went wrong and I finally got the modem on the 30th of December. Meanwhile, I’ve been bedridden with a fever for the last couple of weeks of December, so pretty much no work has taken place between my last update and January.
January
I read all your comments while I was sick and panicked. It seems like a lot of you are really hyped for alpha 9, even though I specifically told you I haven’t made huge advancements. What the heck. I scrambled to add new distribution mechanics, so hopefully it doesn’t end up being a big disappointment. I just finished these mechanics, as you can see in the gifs, and I’m basically back to where I was in December: Still need some balancing work and to write reviews for the review generator. I’m already pretty close to finishing the balancing work. Hopefully writing reviews won’t take too long, even though I’m quite bad at it. I’m not going to give an ETA at this point, as that hasn’t worked out for me these last couple of months.
Distribution overhaul
Having a bunch of separate physical and digital stores has been removed and instead you always sell physical and digital copies of your products. Selling any digital copies in the 80s will be tough, but the market evens out around 2014. You have to actually buy physical copies of your products to sell, or you will only be selling your products digitally. You can buy printers and hire couriers to take over the printing process yourself and possibly earn a little extra by printing for your competitors at a lower price. You can still open an online store to sell your products digitally, but you must make distribution deals with each company separately, taking into account how much of the market you sell to and how big the client is.
TL;DR
Got really sick + no internet = no work done in December. Panicked about expectations, overhauled and improved distribution mechanic, thereby delaying alpha 9 even further. Alpha 9 shouldn’t be too long now.