May I be candid with you? How can I say this without sounding negative...

Promoting yourself sucks. It's the thing I enjoy least about making games. Ok, filing taxes might be worst, but not by much.

That's perhaps why we keep having these lapses in regular updates. 

But it's hard to deny the benefit of letting people, and the algorithms, know that you're still alive and working, or at least twitching sporadically from residual electrical impulses in the nervous system.

I suppose a compromise can be that I will do updates, but I refuse to pretend to be any more enthused about it than I actually am. It'll be good for my sanity, and I hope it won't be bad for yours. I have to believe people appreciate honesty, or at least the people who care enough to be reading something like this. 

Phew, ok, that was nice. Now, what did we do in the last 2 months?

We wrote a lot: Nim did anyways, I helped here and there. 

Many Winters' Briar was given a final polish and is now DONE. I'll be sending keys to our backers shortly. 

Eliel's Bloom is also done, sort of. There's no guarantee we won't edit it more, but for now a fairly polished draft is included with MWB, so if you end up grabbing the updated file of that, you'll now have 2 stories in the Briar-wood(that's what I'm calling all the stories with Briar as connective tissue, Briar-verse would sound way too big for what it is). 

A third story is half way sketched out, but as these things to sometimes, the steam can run out without ceremony and we'll just stop writing it for a while. Good thing is Nim had a burst of inspiration for a totally different story, with different characters and in a different world.

This one is about a torturer. That's really all I can say. It will have a lot of what Briar has, mystery, fleshy characters, horny bits, a good amount of, well, torture. 

Ze has been working on They Came From the Stars. A very early page for it has gone up on itch, for the express purpose of hosting devlogs for the game. There's not much to see yet, but we'll slowly post updates to it for those who want to follow the progress.

In other news, we've been watching Andor, and it's really good. They have a way of making you care about every character, whether good or evil, and often within a few seconds of seeing them for the first time. That's pretty magickal story-telling. We're half-way through season 2, and there's not been a single light-saber, or forcer-user on screen. I hope they don't goose that up!

We saw a few episodes of Foundation. It gets a pass from us. When compared to Andor the writing is much weaker, the characters much less emphathiseable(?) It's really not an adaptation of the Asimov books, which I've read. The books were about how large number of humans behave more like a fluid made of trillions of molecules, whose course can be modeled mathematically. The show is all about how a few uniquely gifted individuals make all the difference. They couldn't be more different in terms of the messages. It would be like if someone made a Tolkien adaptation about how the world can only be saved by a few giga-chads with the financial and technological backings of ultra-rich and politically savvy corporations. 

An unexpected interesting find came in the way of See, a show featuring Jason Momoa as essentially a "blind samurai" living in a post-apoc feudalist world where sight had been missing for so long among survivors that the very idea of it is considered mythical and heretical. 

The next few months for us will be interesting. 

Ze will try out for a job in Toronto, Nim will keep doing Nim things. Since Nim is still burned out on all things Taldun, this means The Longing will be coming along very slowly, depending on how much free time Ze will have from his full time job. 

A benefit of it(for me at least, I'm Ze btw, who's writing this), will be that since I'll have a full time salary and we won't have to rely on our game sales to pay the bills, I can happily stop doing any marketing and not feel guilty about it! Yay! 

There is pretty much only one thing I'll make sure to keep doing, which is to keep posting on ko-fi and patreon, since the folks on there have been helping us a lot. I just won't have much incentive to try and grow our following on social media. Just thinking about it gives me relief. We'll keep making things we love, interacting with people who reach out to us and join our community, and forget about growth and profits and all that. Isn't being overly concerned with those things the reason the world is in the state it is? I say, good riddance. ;)