Hi everyone! 

I hope you all have been doing well since we last talked <3 I had some news I needed to share regarding Alaris and game development/ progress. I was hoping to have done this sooner, but I hope you understand why I wasn’t able to as I explain. 

So recently (this past week) I’ve had a flurry of bad news. Personal struggles that I won’t get too deep into because it’s extremely personal and private - but issues around things like family mental health, personal mental health, and grief and loss - all within the span of a week lol. As you can imagine, it’s been a lot to deal with, especially when I have to balance this on top of game development and real world responsibilities (aka PhD school). It’s been overwhelming, and while Alaris has often been my place for reprieve amongst stress since it’s a creative outlet, I’ve been struggling to create since I think the mental area where I create resides very close to the emotional area that’s been deeply affected by recent events. Anytime I try to sit down and write, I absolutely can’t and find my mind drifting off to the personal struggles. It’s all been incredibly overwhelming for me to deal with, and initially, I had wanted to wait things out to see where time would lead me. Obviously it’s only been a week and this week isn’t even a week after events have occurred, since everything moreso occurred within the span of a week. So in actuality, I would say it’s only been a day or two of actual processing. 

I wanted to create this post to let you all know what I’ve been having to manage. I know with game development, it can be disheartening to not receive constant updates since it can leave people in the dark with whether the game is still being created and things like that. I’m here to let you all know Alaris is still being created, but I may need a small personal break to take care of my mental health. I’ve really had to scale back lately on my daily routine since I’m basically just barely scraping by doing the bare minimum right now. It’s really disheartening obviously because as soon as I get out of my personal burnout and creative funk, I’m hit with more personal stuff. But at the end of the day, your mental health is what is most important, and I want to take care of that so that I can keep making progress on Alaris in the long run. 

For those who want specific updates with the game, I’m still planning on releasing Chapter 2, hopefully sometime over the next couple of weeks. Unfortunately, Free Time won’t be included (as in the next date location that was slated for this release) just because as I said, it’s basically impossible for me to be creative in that way right now. What will be included in the release will be small edits to Chapter 1 - I’ve read and seen your comments on MC and have changed pieces of the writing so the character hopefully feels more consistent - as well as the full main chapter plot of Chapter 2. There’s still a lot of content even if the Free Time update isn’t included, so I hope it still feels sufficient. On top of that, there will be more CGs, sprites, and BGs, all of which I did before receiving the news I did. I’m hoping to also have the Dragon Energy mechanism coded and working in this release as well as any necessary Codex entries and additional stuff. As always, there will also be personality choices and you will be able to see those choices start to reflect in the dialogue in Chapter 2. All in all, it’s going to be a sufficient amount of content, just not the full amount since additional Free Time won’t be included. I hope you all can forgive me and be patient while I work through this personal stuff on my own. What I have planned is to finish the small stuff like coding and game mechanic stuff (since that’s not as intensive as writing for me) and release the Chapter within the next 2ish weeks. I’m hoping this is a good balance of taking things slow for myself while still giving content to you all. After release, I may or may not take an actual break on game development for about 1-2 weeks to just take care of myself since grief is always a brutal process and take care of my family. 

I hope you all understand, and I hope this is a good enough compromise. I wanted to be transparent with you all since I appreciate your support and for those who are interested in the game, I don’t want to let you all down. And at the same time, I’m human and am honestly struggling and hurting a lot right now. Thanks again for all the support, kindness, and patience, and I’ll keep you all updated later this week on game development progress with the usual devlog, until then <3