Not a year, 5 Months.
Message on discord from 25/12/2024:
> Message by Atemsiel:
Merry Christmas, Happy holidays, whatever else you may celebrate.
Firstly, I'd like to apologise for being utterly unresponsive to pretty much all messages and comments recently. I seem to have got myself in a mindset where my only priority is finishing the update, and between that and irl work I've been pretty much blanking the community side of things. Now I see why even indie devs often have a community manager.
I'm gonna try to respond to all the messages and things in the limited time I have in the next hour before I gotta go visit family for Christmas, but anything I don't get to I'll try to do a couple of days after Christmas. So far, this has been probably the busiest year of my life. Outside of irl work and working on the game itself, I've had far less time than I'd like for anything else. In truth, I burned out partially, but not entirely. I chose to put what I still have into making the game instead of chatting, and perhaps went too far with it. I think once the update is actually finished it'll be a breath of fresh air. The main issue right now is the pressure to release the thing. I had no idea it was gonna take this long to make, so while I do still maintain "It's done when it's done", I definitely understand why cyberpunk came out in the state it did, and that game was an entirely different scale.
As for the update, I can't claim there's any specific reason for it taking so long like being sick or whatever, it's just how long it's taking me to make it. Only so many hours in the day, and that can vary for any number of reasons. One reason I don't do more frequent progress updates is I feel I'd be repeating myself with this specific update because I'm having to make so many versions of the same scene. Such is branching. Admittedly there have been a number of irl disruptions to the process, but nothing too crazy. It's up to each of you whether you're happy with that or not. The main point is that the game is still being worked on, and the update WILL be released as soon as I can. I look forward to never making an update this complicated again. I don't 100% know whether it'll be out before the end of the year, but that's what I'm aiming for. I don't expect to come back to discord until the update is actually finished, since that's pretty much my sole focus right now. Once it's done though, I'll come back and see what's up. Thank you for your continued support despite my lack of communication for like half this year.
Also I think iru (Discord mod for those who don't know) sent out a message on Discord to pesky gnome and above subs to remind me of their chosen item. I haven't responded to anyone doing that yet, but I will. Same with any outstanding custom render stuff from before that was cancelled. I will get to it, but the priority is the update. I gotta go for Christmas stuff in like 30 mins, but I'm gonna try to go through messages until then. (Not discord though because I have an absurd amount of notifications there. I'll have to go through them once I have more time.)