Hey folks! Dirk here.

I forgot to talk about this the other week, but better late than never, I guess.

Anyway, Update 6 has been an interesting update. I kinda burnt out with writing towards the end of summer. I had a lot of close misses with job hunting, which hit my morale hard. I had the update plot points and rough outline set since June or July, but took about 3 months to write the actual dialogue. The job hunt, along with miscellaneous personal situations made it hard for me to keep up the motivation to write. Fortunately, things have been on the upside lately, and I've managed to improve to morale, which helped me get back into writing and working on this project in general. When I finished and put the code into the game, I didn't realize it had been 3 months since I touched Ren'Py! Now that the story and main update stuff has been put into the beta test, I can confidently say that Ocean Avenue - Update 6.0 will be out by the end of the month (November 2022). Although there is missing music (and possibly art) intended for update 6, I am happy enough to release it and make changes where necessary. Keep in mind, since we are in the early stages of making this game, additional assets and other parts of the project will be revamped and improved as we get further into development, which leads me into the next topic:

The trajectory for Ocean Avenue has been a rough one. Some updates came out in 1-3 months, while others took half a year! I've been pretty inconsistent with the development, mainly because all creators on the project (including me) are doing this on the side. We all have full-time jobs/commitments, so this is lower on our priorities, not to say we that we don't love working on this project. With all of this in mind, we've had to modify our expectations for our releases and ongoing work for the game. Now that I've said all that, here's what we have in mind going forward: 

For 2023, Ocean Avenue's updates will be targeted for twice a year. 

We might be able to get things out faster if all goes right, but we don't want to set the bar too high for fans and essentially ourselves. Development on the various parts of the game depends on when everyone is available to work on it, which does not always line up for all of us. Sometimes, Luxazule has periods where he can work on music when the rest of us are busy, AWKN_Arts can make art when music and writing are in a lull, etc. This makes the project's art, music, and dialogue come in chunks, which makes the game appear "clunky" at times. As things progress, we should be able to refine that and have that happen less over time. I'll keep y'all up-to-date as these things progress, but if you can (or want to), please be patient with our changes and improvements. We want to do our best with this, but sometimes, our best may not be "100%". It might 65%, 85%, etc.

So, thanks for everyone's support. It makes me happy knowing that I have a better direction with this project going forward, and keeping everyone informed on what that direction is going to be!