Rise and shine, Dwellers!

Hoo boy, we've reached some new milestones recently... and, well...

All I can say is THANK YOU from the bottom of my heart, even though it doesn't feel like it's enough... but truly, I am so moved, and I never thought my games would reach so many people. Know that this means much more to me than you can probably even begin to understand. <3 ILY!

Let's celebrate this with some news, shall we? Many of you have asked about the upcoming major update to Poetry in Purgatory - version 0.2 - and it's on the way, of course. Originally I had hoped for it to be out before the end of October, but because of various reasons (which I shall divulge below... in the serious section) this has not been the case. I'm feeling positive about releasing it before the end of the year however, hopefully making it a sweet lil' December present for y'all.

I've already shared some of the cool new stuff coming in the update, such as the PurgaPhone and a teaser of Apechs's room... but there's much more to come. Such as...

...the ability to finally sleep in Isobel's bed at night (doing so might trigger something special):

...a dedicated music room for all your listening needs:

...and a mysterious, all new corner of Isobel's room (who knows what it will be used for, hmm):

There are more surprises yet to come, along with the already mentioned Apechs route and all new side story content. Due to the large amount of new features, players will have to start a new playthrough for the game to work properly, but I'm certain you'll find it to be worthwhile. :)

Now, the following section of this devlog will deal with stuff related to my personal life and how it impacts development, so if you don't want to read that then consider this the end of the update and thank you so much for reading. :)

So, ever since writing about my grueling experience doing Otome Jam 2023, I've acquired a bit of a reputation for being "an honest dev", one that isn't afraid to talk about the sometimes painful aspects of making games. I'm a passionate person, and making games is my passion, and as such, the gamedev process obviously becomes passionate as well. 

After releasing 0.1 of POiP I was basically an empty shell; I was more drained than I've ever been in my whole life, probably. While OtoJam gave us two months to work on the game, me and the team only really had a month to actually put in that work because of full-time work and/or studies. In a month's time we created everything you can see in the currently downloadable version of POiP, which is in fact more content than in many commercially available visual novels on Steam. 10+ characters with multiple expressions, 70k+ words (story, menus etc), 30+ backgrounds/CGs (counting variations), a world map, a day/night cycle, an inventory system, a quest system, an info pamphlet, three different reactions to everything depending on alignment... oh lord.

To be clear, I'm not writing this to brag, I'm writing this to get the following point across: We were out of our FUCKING minds. It was way too much in such a small window of time, and we paid dearly for it mentally. It took everything I had to conjure the motivation to do Guidelicious just a few weeks later, and then, with that successfully released... I just shut down. I went to the doctor and got the diagnosis: burnout. I haven't been able to work either (by which I mean my job as a grade school teacher) since all this, meaning that I've basically been confined to my sofa since the end of August, nevermind having the energy to work on games. 

I remember thinking to myself that I used to joke about burning out, like I see so many fellow devs do. But trust me, it's not quite as fun when you're on the other side... take care of yourselves.

A part of me wanted to talk about this earlier, but I didn't want to do so without bringing some positivity with me. The positivity in this case being the fact that I'm back to working on games again since a few weeks back, though the process is much slower and more healthy now. I've yet to return to my job, though, and just thinking of it brings me great anxiety. But I'll get there. For now, though, I'm taking it one day at a time, and weird as it may sound I'm actually kinda thankful all this happened because, well, the way I was going... it was bound to happen eventually. Now I can learn from it, hopefully bringing with it that both me and my team can work on these games for years to come. :)

Thank you so much for reading this, and for all the support!

Look forward to more exciting news as we get closer to release. :)

All the love,

Tymedust