Hello again, everyone!

It's getting on towards summer, and it's starting to get incredibly hot where I live. June hasn't even begun and I'm already spending the majority of my days and nights sweating buckets. I can tell it's going to be a rough few months, and the same can probably be said in regard to Forge:Re's development. After all, we're about to enter the final stretch of this ridiculously long editing pass.

I suppose I'll start by giving a brief overview of where development is at. As expected, I finished editing Chapter Four maybe a week and a half ago. This, of course, means there's only one chapter left to edit before I can begin releasing Forge:Re officially. I'm still aiming to push the Prologue and Chapter One out sometime in August, though we're probably looking at late August. Needless to say, I'll keep you all posted and publish an announcement when an official date is set. Beyond that, I've finished up all the prep work I need to do for Chapter Five, and I've been working on putting some of the finishing touches on Chapter Four. What do I mean by that? Well, the QA worker who was in charge of double-checking my changes to Chapter Four's daily life finished up their part of the work. As such, I've decided to put that final layer of polish on the daily life before moving on to Chapter Five.

Just to put into perspective how much work is going into this editing pass, the document I handed off to my QA person for Chapter Four's daily life was over 140 pages long. That's 140 pages of edits I was unsure of or wanted help with. Suffice to say, there were plenty of edits I made that I didn't feel the need to put in the doc. But to summarize the workflow: I edit each chapter and put any questionable edits in a doc -> My QA workers look it over and make revisions/suggestions -> I go over each document and implement their changes as I see fit -> I playtest the chapter to make sure everything's looking good. It's quite a long and involved process, and seeing as there are hundreds upon hundreds of pages of edits to go over for each chapter, you can see why this editing pass has taken as long as it has.

Luckily, all that remains is Chapter Five, and while it's the longest chapter of all (though only by a small margin), I don't anticipate there being any problems that might prevent me from getting it done on time. After all, summer is nearly upon us! I'm free from my educational obligations, which gives me a lot more wiggle room. I plan to jump right into Chapter Five in a day or two's time. Normally I would say I hope to have the daily life finished by the end of June, but the daily life is far and away the beefiest part of Chapter Five, so that might be a little optimistic. Whatever happens, I'll be sure to let you know how far along I am in the next update, as usual!

'Til then!