This is not an April Fool’s Day post.

I just posted this on the game devlog for Patriah. If you’ve been around my work for a long time you’ll know what I mean, but if you don’t, please take a look at the itch.io page.

I apologize to anyone who may have anxiously awaited updates for the past 7 years (!) about this game. Obviously I’m not a full-time game dev and everything happens so much.

tl;dr version: I took a look at Patriah and decided I want to finish it, and now it’s a matter of figuring out how to survive. Maybe that sounds dramatic but this game is really hard to work on thanks to my own trauma.

Long version:

On March 28th I hosted a stream where I played through the Patriah demo and also reviewed some unreleased content. The intent was to revisit this game and see how I felt about it. I recorded and uploaded that stream here, which is available for paid members on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/125588723

This was at the advice of my beloved friend Christian, who encouraged me to either finish Patriah or move on, and advised that doing so might involve going over it again and investigating where my feelings were on the project.

After playing it over again, I think I can say that I love this game and want to see it done, though given the content and how difficult it is to deal with, that is easier said than done. Playing Patriah is much easier than writing Patriah, though I can thank my past self for doing most of the writing already. There actually isn’t too much left to put together in terms of writing, and once that’s done, the rest will be easy, even if it is programming and all the “hard” stuff. In this case, the hard stuff is easier because I don’t have to put myself into Patriah‘s world and her headspace to make it.

All that is to say, I plan to finish Patriah once and for all, even though it’s been 7 years.

I’m going to scale back all my ambitions and try to focus on making something much like the demo: harrowing in content but simple and tidy in presentation. I might not make the “true route” for the ending at all, and patch it in at a later date if people are interested. I’m going to accept that the game might not be constantly updated to be run on the newest software, but maybe I’ll pay someone to do maintenance now and then.

To get there I have to finish writing the final route, which can be emotionally difficult. I thought maybe I could give myself a “writer’s retreat,” but I almost feel like what I need is the opposite. Being alone and wrangling with Patriah might put me in places I don’t want to go, but if I can go there for 1-2 days, I think I can finish it once and for all, but comfort myself with friends and loved ones and other little treats to get through it, like a sauna visit and a manicure or something. I’ve never had a manicure (or a pedicure or any of that shit). To ground myself through it, I think I have to wait for the weather to improve, or at least be sure we’ve left winter behind.

Hopefully I’ll be sending you good news about this before long.

Thank you all for your support, and I hope you’re still interested in seeing the finished game.

Love, Dawn