Made Marion June Development Update: Schedule Edition, Straight Talk

[I decided to post our June dev update early, because I have some difficult things to say, but I hope this will get us all on the same page about what's happened with Made Marion since our Kickstarter.]

Hi everyone! I've decided to check in early with a report on our development schedule and some straight talk on some tough stuff. I hope this will help us all get on the same page and be excited instead of worried about Made Marion's development process.

First of all, thank you all so much for your magnificent patience and concern! This is definitely not how I wanted Made Marion's development to go or how it would have gone if things were still the way they were for our team back when we ran our Kickstarter. We have been seriously kicked in the teeth repeatedly, and I'd like to offer a better explanation and our proposed solutions and revised schedule.

I'm also sorry for the lack of pretty pictures this month!  There will be many available very soon when Robin's beta test is ready to go!

The Problems:

1. As of fall 2021, things were going pretty well! We'd just run a beta for Made Marion's prologue and my route outlines were shaping up nicely. Then things began to go wrong. I had some issues at home that took up my attention, and then my darn town flooded. Drat it, ok, lost a couple months, but we can get back on track in 2022...

2. Then 2022, for various reasons was a disaster for pretty much our entire team (I'm only going to talk about my problems here, because those are the ones it is mine to share). It ended up being basically a wash for development. Why wasn't that obvious from our development updates? Because of my brain. I contracted Covid in January of 2022 and a few weeks later, the Long Covid symptoms started. I was near-narcoleptic for several months. It was scary and embarrassing and I didn't know how to talk about it. So I was as positive as I could be. Around May, my body started to recover. I was able to live more normally and I figured that meant I could get back to development.

What I didn't know and couldn't effectively communicate was that the brain fog was still there. I was writing, but not in a straight line. I wrote scenes for all the love interests here and there, scribbled a bunch in my notebooks, but a full, logical route for Robin wasn't happening. And the problem with your brain not working right is that it's very difficult to understand that your brain isn't working right. I thought things were cool! So it appeared that I wasn't being honest about the status of development without me realizing it did or even fully understanding that development wasn't going well. I'm very sorry about that.

3. Around November of 2022 my brain started working better again, but I was demoralized and felt like I'd forgotten how to write. I "eased" myself back into writing with a huge fic, along with finally getting back to putting words together for Robin. I wrote words!  Lots of words!  Good words!  Yeah!  We pulled together as a team and got our enhanced demo out, which was a lot of work but was super exciting.

4. Feeling guilty about the wash that was 2022 and excited because of how much verbiage I'd put out, I created an ambitious schedule toward an Early Access release of all the Sherwood routes this fall. It was based on the amount of words I'd been putting out, so I was convinced it was doable. Some of you wrote in to Tumblr with concerns that it was overly ambitious. You were wonderful and primarily concerned for my well-being. You were also correct.

The Solutions:

1. I need to accept that I have a disabling condition that currently has no cure and that, although it has greatly improved since last year, means that I can't always work at my peak capacity. This is super tough for a high achiever with general anxiety. I hate even talking about it, but I want to be as transparent with y'all as I can be.

2. The schedule: I still wish to keep a relatively ambitious target schedule for the remainder of development. I think it is helping us all Get Shit Done(tm). I just need to be a little less ambitious. I still plan to release Early Access this fall and I'm still hoping for October (which was always tentative), but November may be more realistic. It depends on how well my body and mind cooperate over the summer, and on the individual situations of our artists. Early Access will launch with Robin and Will's routes. John is going to need to take more time. It will be worth it, because he will get the full attention and care that his wonderful self deserves.

3. The weekly mini-dev updates: I have started posting mini-dev updates on Mondays on Tumblr. This is the place to go if you want a more granular report of the progress we've been making, and I think they're going to be very helpful for maintaining clarity and helping keep us all on-task.

4. Beta: I have more detailed information about Beta in the Kickstarter version of this update.

Conclusion:

Looking back from here, our original release date estimate from Kickstarter was too ambitious even under ideal circumstances. That was my development inexperience speaking. The rest was a lot of IRL horribleness. However, the gang is back together now, and the game is now, actually, truly, progressing nicely once more. Going forward, I'll be able to post much more concrete progress and I think doing so as I write each route is a better choice than posting a bunch of specific completion dates that we may not meet. You'll be able to see our progress as it happens instead.

Notes and Goodies:

Robin's new expressions are in!  I love the way he turned out and Arrapso (a fellow perfectionist, err, high achiever) seems happier with him now as well.  Awesome!  I will post some previews on Tumblr soon, once I have coded a few of the new expressions into the game client.

John's role-playing choice has been re-configured a bit. I was previously calling it "conflict or compromise," but I was getting stuck on the "conflict" part because I didn't want Marion and John to be fighting all the time if you made those choices. It didn't seem like fun, or particularly in-character for John. I am now calling it "challenge or compromise."  Because John is kind and wonderful and protective but is also traumatized and stubborn and overprotective. Sometimes he needs to be challenged, and it won't always lead to an argument. I think this makes for more interesting choices and for John to have more room to be John.

I coded in Will's first use of his genuine smile expression (you get to confront him about his attitude early on in Robin's route) and am happy to report that it is SUPER EFFECTIVE.

For any of you Ren'py devs out there, I continue to evangelize matrixcolor.  It's relatively new, but you should absolutely check out what it can do. Previously, I used it to tint our characters a bit so they blended in better with evening and night backgrounds.  I also used it to sepia-tone memory sequences.  I've now used it to make images slowly disappear via transparency and turn our blood animation green instead of red for... spoiler purposes.  It is so easy and flexible, you should absolutely play with it!

I'll be reporting in later this month on our Beta test status!