Hello, everyone!

It's been a long road, but we're finally... finally only a month away from release. I'm going to keep this update relatively short and sweet, since I've been pulling some pretty long days lately to get everything finalized, and there's still quite a bit I have to do yet today. But before I get into an overview of how things are progressing, I'd like to touch on something rather serious.

This past month has been quite possibly the hardest month of my life. As if this year wasn't awful enough already, my entire life got turned upside down in one of the worst ways possible. I'm not going to go into details or anything, but my productivity was crippled in the first half of this month. There were some days where I could quite literally do nothing but curl up in a ball and wallow in despair. Fitting, given the nature of this series, but none too pleasant to experience. Also quite ironic, given that I'd just said there would be no delays or anything in Forge:Re's release.

That said, I'd like to take a quick moment to reassure you that Chapter One's release date is unchanged. I've been pulling such long days lately to make up for lost time, and I've largely succeeded. I just put the finishing touches on Chapter One not but an hour ago, and I'm prepared to move into Chapter Two tomorrow. I'd like to maintain this momentum of being a chapter ahead for as long as I can. However, this is largely unrealistic for a few reasons.

For one thing, the recent changes to my life situation forced me to bring my work on Chapter Five to a screeching halt. Put simply, I got about halfway through editing the chapter before I was forced to drop it. And after I had recovered enough to resume working on Forge:Re, I decided it'd be best to simply focus on finalizing Chapters 1-4 than to continue focusing on Chapter Five. So as of right now, Chapter Five is still far from polished. What's more, Chapter Five is bigger than Chapters One and Two combined.

What does this all mean? There's a very good chance Chapter Five will not release a month after Chapter Four as originally planned. The gap might be more like a month and a half in length, or, god forbid, two months in length. Regardless of what happens, the majority of my beta testers/QA people seem to regard Chapter Five as their favorite chapter, so it'll be worth the wait.

It's an unfortunate situation, and I'm sad that Chapter Five might be delayed, but this entire year is unfortunate, so what did we really expect? I'm just glad I was able to reel it in as much as I could and get Chapter One finished a month in advance.

I don't think there's too much more to say, so I'd just like to take a moment to remind those who haven't yet to join Forge:Re's discord server, as it's the only place where each release's download link will be available. Other than that, please continue looking forward to finally getting your hands on the game, and I'll see you on release day!