News and Preview

Hello!

First of all I'm sorry for again being unable to deliever the update on the promised deadline, that's why you may already have seen that I've stopped all the pledges untill the release of an update. Let me get that clear - I have no plans on abandoning the project and I have no plans on any other project besides Red Room. So no "abandoned" tag or hopping to other things will happen. I have all of my intentions on developing and finishing The Red Room and I'm sorry for not making it clear with the proper communication.

Why am I so repulsively unable to properly communicate with you? I'm just one person and this is my personality. But besides that I'm trying to distance myself from justified but really unmotivating criticism on my undelievered deadline promises. I'm sorry for being such a snowflake - but this is just how it is. 

When will I release an update? Hopefully this month, but due to the reasons I'll state beneath the release could be postponned. I will also provide the solution to this to your judgement - you can write in comments what you think about it.

So, why I'm unable to deliever then? Right now I'll go through everything happening and why I was unable to do as promised while also explaining what will happen after I'll release it:

• I'm a bad case of perfectionism. I hope you can see it in my work but the other side of the coin is that I'm REALLY slow at the development. I can spend up to 5-6 hours a day just tweaking and working on the details of the synopsis of the single scene. And it's a single example.
  The most damned thing about it is that I don't think that my work is that good to spend so much time on it. But I really enjoy this meticulous workflow.
• And when I try to rush myself I end up scrapping and reworking everything. And if I don't do that either I feel that my work is subpar and I end up losing all of my motivation to work. Only a week without any work can restore my motivation after that.
• I still have a college to maintain (and an end-year project right now) and it's eating a good chunk of my time when I'm not sleeping.
• Because of that I sleep too little and it furtherns my "downward spiral" if you can call it that.
• And last - but certainly not least I HAVE to give myself some personal time to recharge the batteries. Play new adult/normal games, watch some movies and be filled with recent news just to not end up like some out of touch CEO of the big gamedev company who haven't played any game for 30 years.

Those are the reasons why this small-ass update is taking me so long to make. The good question is "Are all further updates will take as long to develop? Why do I really need to bother with you or your game?"
And you are right - you don't have to. I hope to restore your trust with the subsequent updates which will take ~2.5 months to release. It's certainly not faster than average adult game developer schedule but it is faster than my update workflow.
Why so much faster then? Because even if you will not be able to see it I have laid a good foundation for more content in the future (mostly story-wise) and the MOST boring and unmotivating technical stuff will be already done.
As for now - I've already completed a majority of this boring work, but new and unexpected problems pop up with a decent consistency so I can't have a good estimate of how much I've done - just some loose deadline. I know that most of the folks measure updates in image quantity - by my assumption the update will have at least half-amount of images that have been in an intro update.

So why it could be postponned again? 3-4 months ago I've quit my job to concentrate on a development (didn't paid off well). But now I need to pay my bills myself again as I've stopped the donations. So now I'm working again but this time only half-time to have at least a little bit of time to work on the game.
And I know that it sucks - but I need to eat, a place to live and my student loan to pay off.
But if it will become clear that the postponning is inevitable I will have 2 routes. Releasing an update without some features OR continue working on it for god knows how much time. Right now I haven't decided yet what will I do. 

I hope I've clarified the situation with The Red Room. I want to be completely honest here so that's why this post is so long - not that I want to make anyone sympathize with my situation, I just want to inform you on what is happening. I hope that my wording is making it clear.
And again - I'm sorry for my bad decision making. I hope to get better for the sake of myself, game and all of you too.

And bonus to that is a little preview - it's from the game and it shows a new character I haven't presented yet. It's not that hard to understand with whom this character is connected and in what way :)

I still have a discord server - if you have a discord connected to your account and you are my patron (which for now is a free endeavour) you will be automatically connected to it. It hosts non-adult previews from the game too. I'm slow at answering there - but at least I'm faster there than anywhere else.