Patriah Delay - The Paul Problem

Hi everyone!

It's taken me a long time to get to writing this post, since I've been very busy the past few months. Rest assured that development on Patriah continues, but I will have to delay the game. My ideal at this time is to release it for March 8th, 2019, although that date is tentative. That day is International Women's Day, as well as my birthday! It would mean a lot to me if I could get it done by then.

While I have been busy with outside projects, the real culprit of this delay is the game itself and my own emotional fortitude. 

The first time I triggered myself while working on Patriah was, remarkably, not while I wrote Joshua's route. It happened when I was editing it, in the spring of 2017. Summer and fall of 2017 were spent creating assets and coding the demo into Ren'py. The second time I triggered myself was during this period, when I drew the sprites for Paul.

Writing the first draft of Paul's route was slow going, because this became a theme in my relationship with him. The process of writing as much as I could quickly degraded into evenings spent on self-care and soothing. In order to make any advancement, I started what I called the "Patriah 100", which I could have called the "Paul 100", which was the goal of writing 100 words per day, or as often as possible. This let me work on this upsetting content in tiny windows, like peeks through my fingers, before moving on to something else.

Paul's route was torture to write, and is very unhappy to play through, but it portrays a woefully true experience that many of us know all too well, which makes me feel that it is still important to include. I pray that he was the worst, or else Patriah might turn into a much longer project than I've been anticipating.

Thank you all for following along, and I beg your patience while I work through this troubling content. Rest assured, the post-mortem is going to be a very interesting discussion.