A Discussion About the Update Schedule (+ Important Poll) (Patreon)

Hey everyone! I hope this post finds you well!

I’ve been needing to talk about something for a bit now that’s been a problem. As you guys may have noticed if you’ve read my update blurbs lately, I haven’t exactly been having the greatest 2021 in terms of my mental health.

Fortunately, I think I’ve been able to figure out one of the reasons why I’m not feeling so great anymore.

Unfortunately, though, it has to do with the current update structure we have for Santa Lucia.

SL is a significantly more plot and narrative focused VN than our contemporaries, and a big theme of the game is masks. In fact, the biggest meta part of the whole project is how the game itself wears “Slice of Life” as a mask to cover its dark secrets.

As a consequence of this artistic choice, the expectations of how a “Slice of Life” VN is typically updated fall on the game, too. Patrons have grown accustomed to “Slice of Life” Vns updating their routes in a cyclical fashion, usually one month per character route. The issue this has presented to SL, though, isn’t necessarily visible to the reader.

I have been struggling really bad to reconcile the expected update structure with my ability to keep this heavily narrative and detail-focused plot consistent and structured. If we look back at the past two Carlos updates, we can see quite clearly how badly I faltered trying to keep up. I had to go back in the timeline to add in additional days to his route because of narrative elements I didn’t manage to fit in properly.

As it currently stands, I am essentially juggling three different stories that all need to fit into a structure that is woven and dependent on details that I desperately need the structure for in order to write content that meets my high standards. Constantly switching between who’s route I’m writing for means that the moment I start to get on a roll with one character, I’m switching to another, which has had the effect of killing all momentum I built up over the course of a month as well as diminishing my motivation to keep going.

If I were to make a somewhat tasteless comparison, this update schedule bears an alarming resemblance of a torture method I learned about as a Psychology student. It’s goal was to destabilize the victim’s sleep schedule by playing the same loud song over and over so that they get used to it, and then right as they’re about to fall asleep, they’d switch the song. Now, the human brain isn’t wired for this, so this results in the person suddenly becoming wide awake again. Then they’d have to start falling asleep from scratch...until the torturer switches the song again.

This is kinda what it feels like with the monthly route rotation. Just as I’m starting to get in a rhythm with a character, I have to switch to another at the beginning of a new month. This means I have to start from scratch and build up all the momentum again, this time for a different character only to have it undermined again by the end of the month. It really upsets me that this is happening, too, since I took February off for mental health reasons and encroaching burnout, only to jump back into things and find myself approaching burnout faster than I ever have before.

I desperately need to make a change before I end up unable to work on SL anymore.

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This is what I’m proposing to do, and it’s the reason why I’m making this post so that we’re all on the same page because I’m well aware of how unpopular the current structure ended up being. I attempted to go for a compromise approach since I anticipated something like this happening to my mental health, but I also knew players are accustomed to a certain style of update schedule. I figured giving one character an extra update over the other two would help me push the story further faster and provide the structure necessary to smooth everything out.

Unfortunately, things don’t always go according to plan.

Santa Lucia is organized into three acts. We have already finished Act 1, which capped off with the service trip. There are two more acts, each with equally dramatic endpoints.

What I am proposing is that I focus on a single character up until the end of Act 2, then switch to the next in line.

What this offers me as a writer is a consistent storyline to focus on, which should mean you the reader receive a higher quality route. With the first major route pushed all the way to a threshold, that also means the vast majority of shared content between the routes is already written, which means the second and third routes will progress at a much faster rate.

The last benefit it offers is mainly for me as the writer. The update schedule as presented so far has been surprisingly detrimental to my mental health, and I would like to be able to address that before things start spiraling out of control.

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Since this is a pretty big change, I am going to open up another poll for you guys to vote on which character you would prefer to be the route I focus on until the end of Act 2 threshold. This will not affect this month’s focus on Nate, which is still going to release according to schedule.

The poll will close on July 5th, 2021. 

Thank you guys for hearing me out on this. It wasn’t easy having to come clean about my mental health. As you have probably figured out by now, I’m an intensely private person, so talking about my issues on such a scale really fills me with anxiety.

Here’s hoping for the best!

~Dzahn