[Poll] and a message from Aika (Patreon)

Development of the next version is currently behind schedule and also will be stalled for a further ~10 days.

tl;dr at the end for people who don't care about my life story.

Since about midway through 2019, I've been trying to keep things as close to 'business as usual' as possible every single month whilst keeping the whirlwind that is my private life as private as possible, but this last couple of months have thrown a lot of curveballs and so I feel like the people financially supporting me deserve a proper explanation for why things are lagging.

Firstly, in 2019, I sneakily became a parent. That massively slashed the time I had each day in front of my PC. Instead of significantly cutting output or lowering prices (I want to pay my staff better, not worse, and also be able to afford to hire more coders), I simply went from playing about 4-6 hours of videogames a day to 0. That combined with childcare support from family has kept this crazy gravy train rolling.

But there's more. My partner has a very very intense job with very little flexibility and also there was this pandemic thing. But by seeing what was coming and moving in with family before any lockdown rules came along, we were able to keep family-based childcare at a (barely) sustainable level. Still I assure you, behind the scenes it's been a wild ride.

Anyway with things looking up, and my partner's job soon to become less intense, I got a bit cocky and spent too much of this development cycle making a fun Discord game that people have had a lot of fun with, but isn't actually the thing most people are paying me to do (at least not yet lol) and that, along with a week of non-covid-related illness in our house, has left me behind schedule.

Anyway the newest update is that due to isolation instructions from the NHS Covid App due to meeting someone who has recently tested positive, we are now without any childcare at all for over a week. So, that leaves me unable to meet even an extended proposed release date of 7th July.

I am sorry for how much this sucks but it's hopefully pretty much the first time that the craziness of everything has deviated TQ production enough from 'normal' for most of you to notice.

Anyway I now have a decision to make. I can delay things by 2+ weeks and hopefully get a release that looks like it should out at some point in July, but then I'll be playing some pretty challenging catchup over the next two months due to the delay. Alternatively I could spend a short while attempting to polish what exists so far and then call it done, but I'm worried people will be rather disappointed with where we're at compared to where we're usually at, at this point. A third option could be to call this another unstable build, release it only to patrons, and then delay the public stable build by a month. But I would need to do some more scheduling juggling down the road to get the end of October Halloween release and end of December Christmas release back to being stable public releases, so this might end up just delaying the problem, rather than fixing it. I'm not sure yet. Unfortunately with my commitments to paying all the people who help develop the game, I'm not in a financial position to do what I've seen a couple of other creators in similar positions do and pause billing for a month.

tl;dr: Aika has lost childcare for a while and the next version is therefore still over two weeks away. Whoops.

So why not ask you guys, the lovely humans who actually fund this endeavour, what you'd prefer me to do?

Either pick your favourite option, or pick your two most preferred options, as a way to effectively say "not the other option".