OOC: Umberage Hill
Most of you I'm in constant contact with on Discord, but for those that aren't, let me apologize for the slowness.
In addition to my normal job, I volunteer for a foreign au pair program. Normally, neither one of those impact my free time all that much. My work usually ends at 6, and the au pair stuff usually takes about 2 hours worth of phone calls and text conversations in a given month, freeing up the rest of my time for RPOL. Au pair stuff started going nuts in May/June, and then work exploded in June/July when they put me in charge of a forgotten project that hasn't been touched by a developer in six years, that they now realize has cast the company tens of millions of dollars worth of services we sold/provided but never charged anyone for.
So now I'm doing my development work during my normal 9-6 shift, then meeting, training, or coordinating with the Korean development team for 1-8 hours after my normal shift, every day. I can handle it, it both is and isn't as bad as it sounds, but it's a lot of work, a lot of stress/expectations, and a lot of extra hours. Some days I straight up don't have the hours in the day for posting, and sometimes I have the time but I just don't have the mental oomph or creative energy left to make a post that doesn't just...suck.
I've been active on this site for over 20 years. I'm not going anywhere, and I'm not shutting the game down. I just want to make sure everyone knows the situation so that you're not left wondering about what's going on. I've always been big on having a daily posting schedule. As others here can attest, my normal mode of operation is to be playing in 20+ games at a time, running 1-2 of my own, and being so caught up on posts in all of them that I'm bored out of my mind and spamming F5 hoping for somebody, somewhere, to post something that I can respond to.
Things are going to be slow for a bit longer, though, as I work on this project. My deadline for it is mid-December, but my personal goal is to have it wrapped up no later than mid-October. There has been some talk about letting me hire 1-2 developers to work under me, which would take a lot of the stress off. It won't help much with the hours, since I'll still have to be the one meeting with the Korean team, but hopefully it will leave me with the cognitive resources to post even on the harder days, and maybe free up some of my time in the 9-6 stretch to post while I'm at work during the longer days. They started talking about having me hire people back in February, and it hasn't happened yet, so I'm not holding my breath on that one, but there's still a chance.
They're talking about putting me in charge of another huge project too, because of the progress they've seen me make with this one. I won't have to work with the Korean team for that one though, and it will require me to hire help, so if that goes through then we might be back on track sooner than expected. Taking on the second project would also include a promotion and a raise, so I won't complain too much if that one does go through. We'll see.
In the meantime, I'll post when I can. Once I get this first projected wrapped up, we'll get back to the steady posting rate that this game was used to
This message was last edited by the GM at 15:05, Fri 02 Sept 2022.
