Hey guys, it's Tristan, the writer/director/designer/man-with-many-hats at Broken Window Studios. I imagine a lot of you how been waiting around for an update for a while and I want to assure you that it's coming, but our original plans didn't come together as well as we had hoped so we had to break our schedule. I have sort of dropped off from the forums for the last month or so and that may be viewed as a lack of interest; I can assure you that it isn't. We had a few issues with Unity versions and needed to resolve issues with our framework, but at the same time a few other things were transpiring that have made the updates slower than intended. To put it bluntly, I have been going through a bit of an existential crisis over the last few months that I need to share as a way of explaining the delays and challenges. I know that you come to Steam to play games, not to have deep conversations with strangers about their work. That being said, if you support Reflections in Early Access, you're a part of the development process, and it seems that withholding the challenges along the way would be misrepresenting it. If you don't want to read this there's no need to, but I feel the need to express some of it. This is a bit of a dump of thoughts and feelings so you have been fairly warned. Reflections is a very personal game to me. It started as a way for me to address how I was feeling as I got ready to graduate from college in 2012, before I had any big industry jobs or concrete career plans. In that way, Reflections is a study of what I think is so amazing about games, but it's also a pseudo-autobiography. It is a window into what I was thinking and feeling at the time, and still do. The challenge of doing something like this, particularly when you have a team of people working on it, is discovering the gap between what you are trying to say and how artfully it is currently being expressed. In creative work generally, every criticism or complaint speaks volumes and the praise often seems dwarfed by it, even when the praise vastly outnumbers the criticism. This is a sentiment I've heard a lot of people express so I think I'm not alone; a single negative voice tends to drown out hundreds or even thousands of positive ones. That's just the nature of our brains to some degree; we have a confirmation bias, and deep down inside, most of us don't think what we do is worth anything. Success tends to feel like tricking people, and when someone speaks poorly of your work it often seems like they simply "saw through" your ruse. You are a fraud and they found out. The subtleties and complications of why someone posts a negative comment or review are almost never apparent, but I think it's pretty safe to say that they aren't intending to crush your spirit. I know the game isn't finished, but there's something extremely vulnerable about releasing a game, particularly like this one, to the eyes of the public before it's truly ready to go. We needed the feedback, and even the very negative is making us feel like we understand what the game is a little better and what needs to happen to improve it. We don't take all the advice, nor do I think we should, but in general we feel that every comment is useful. Unfortunately, that feedback sometimes comes at times when really unpleasant stuff has been happening. I've been subsisting on a bare-bones wage cobbled together largely from loans, contract work and now a part-time teaching job, and we have had to scale back the size of production to make sure the company won't shut down. At the moment, I'm the only full time employee on the game, and I'm doing it in addition to other responsibilities, such as making sure my wife and I don't end up on the street. It's hard to describe, but feeling financially uncertain really affects the output of creative work, and that has contributed to delays. I become afraid to check back in, because I worry that I'm going to see someone who is disappointed or angry at me for what I have or have not done. I know that you're not supposed to care about my problems, so when I'm sad or depressed on not feeling productive I don't feel like I can share any of that. So instead, I just drop off, stop checking emails, stop reading the forums, and sometimes, stop getting out of bed. Video games are a huge inspiration for me in my life but they can also seem like an abyss, where I lose myself in them instead of making meaningful progress on my work or fixing my own issues. When life is good, I often play video games less, but when I'm feeling down it becomes a form of escapism that I get stuck in. The challenge I have right now with production is that it's basically just me, and I'm at a point where a lot of the work left to do is all in the head space of what goes into the scenes to improve them. The mechanics are largely there, there are bugs still, but the largest thing left to do is really bring all the pieces together and make a cohesive game. This involves changing the conversation system, filling the conversations with worthwhile content, changing scenes around, adding a few new scenes, adding complexity to the scenes we have, removing a few things that aren't working and generally improving the game so it can be ready to launch. There's a really long list that I have in an Excel spreadsheet of everything I need to do, and while that helps keep organized, it can also seem pretty overwhelming at times. This is my first commercially released game as an independent, and I think there's usually an act that people put on where they pretend that they are more confident or more comfortable than they actually are. I often call this "peacocking," the idea that you try to make yourself look bigger and more impressive to fool people. I think most people do it to some degree, and because of that a lot of genuine honesty can be seen as weakness. I don't want people out there to believe I don't know how to make games, or that I can't see the problems with the game, or that I'm giving up or quitting. When we put in the timer for our updates, we felt that it was necessary to keep people excited and ready to check back in. What I didn't really plan for was how this type of game doesn't really work like a conventional consumer product. The biggest things that need improvement are on the side of narrative and engagement, not incrementally adding features or filling a metaphorical glass. A lot of what Reflections is needs to be retooled, refined, altered and reshaped before it's ready to ship in a final state. I think I'm going to remove the update timer because I don't think it suits. Reflections doesn't really run on the timetable I was thinking it would, and having the timer has been leading to a sense of failure that has actually slowed down my updates. Once we've failed to meet one date, every day that passes seems like it's putting more pressure or makes me feel added doubt. Will people think what we did was worth the extra time or would they just think we wasted the time? I realized Reflections wasn't coming out as an honest representation of me or the feelings I wanted to convey when I started working on it in 2012. To be honest, the reason an update hasn't come out yet is I've been trying to tool with the concept and figure out the best way to bring the missing vitality back to the game, the concept that I had for it originally but that got hidden away by deadlines and financial obligations and a sense of prior commitment. I realized only recently that all I should be doing is focusing on making Reflections the best game possible. That's what I'm doing now. We are extremely grateful for the support we've received on Steam and in the community in general. I really hope this huge rant didn't come off as whining or ungrateful. I can't actually believe that I wrote all this or that I'm about to click "Post." This actually hit Steam's word count a few times while I wrote it.