Sorry for the delays in messaging, everyone! It's been 3 months since the last devlog, and I wanted to talk a little about what the current state of the game is, what I've learned from Otome Jam (again), and what my future plans are for Heart Sigil Elchemia.

State of the Game

• The entire common route is expected to be 5 chapters, of which 2 are now released (itch.io) in demo form.
• I have another 2 chapters of the common route mostly written, although they need to be heavily edited before they're released as actual game.
• Soma's route has been outlined and is halfway scripted, although script will take longer to write than expected, and may be significantly edited once again.
• I'm working now on revamping the outline of Lin's route to account for some changes I've made to his character.

Otome Jam

I'd like to go into a more thorough post-mortem about this later, but fundamentally: I put too much work on myself during Otome Jam and ended up hurting myself - and have since learned that I have to be far more careful about how much energy I can put into the game.

Takeaway 1: Crunch bad.

Takeaway 2: NOTHING is worth causing yourself health problems.

Future Goals

Heart Sigil Elchemia is a story very close to my heart, and I want to tell it as well as I can. But as mentioned above, I will need to pace myself more slowly; I don't want to burn out before I've shown you all the intensity/drama/Frey-ness of some of the later routes.

Right now, my plans are still to release 4/5 chapters of the common route as a full "extended demo", hopefully by the end of this year. However, the full game will likely not be released in 2023 - that would require me to spend the entirety of my non-day-job hours on it, and would certainly burn me out.

I'm going to try to pace myself better going forward, and set a schedule that allows for more consistent work at regular intervals, rather than nothing and then suddenly "everything" for a jam. Hopefully this will allow you guys to get more regular updates as well, because I'm not randomly stuck in crunch mode for months at a time!

FAQs

1. ARE YOU OKAY?? (Yes! I'm okay! I just feel a bit stupid now for not realizing how much crunch takes out of me. DON'T CRUNCH.)
2. Will you consider releasing the entire game chapter-by-chapter if it's less stressful? (Debatable! I'm also not a huge fan of chapter-based releases because I personally prefer to play the entire finished work at once, but I'll keep that in mind as an option.)
3. Where's the Lin capsule image from?? (My dev newsletter will show it in the next issue! Sign up here :D)