Hello to the person reading this announcement. I am not the person who normally writes these -- that would be Claire, the game director/writer/artist -- but this update concerns the game engine itself, which is my department -- I'm Brandon, the programmer.

The short summary is that I am having a friend (well, to be exact, it's Claire's girlfriend!) help me rewrite basically all of the game engine.

I wrote the bulk of this game's code in 2013, when I quit my office job and lived off of savings for about a year. I was still a pretty novice programmer at the time and there's a lot in the engine that's pretty messy an in-elegant, but most of that doesn't directly impact the game experience itself. When it comes to Software Engineering, it's always hard to justify to non-programmers the process of code refactoring -- rewriting and restructuring potentially large amounts of code to make them more maintainable and efficient -- and this is especially true when it comes to products with heavy financial obligations like a video game (and a video game that isn't even out of Early Access to boot!).

However, refactoring the code myself was just gonna be too much of an undertaking for me personally. I've spent several years of my adult life working on this game engine, and I'm too close to the code and too invested in this project to give the proper effort an engine refactor requires. So when Claire's girlfriend offered to take a look at my code and see what she can do, I gladly accepted.

The point of this announcement is to simply give an update saying that this game is still being worked on. With an RPG that's as complex as The Magic Wolves, it's imperative that the game's engine isn't a total mess. Like I said earlier, most of the messiness isn't reflected in the actual game experience, but there are definitely some known bugs that will be fixed by this refactoring process.

Thanks for taking the time to read this announcement and I hope you continue to enjoy The Magic Wolves!

-- Brandon