We were both pretty burned out by the Retro Platform game jam that birthed this project, and we decided to take a little time to recover before pushing on. Unfortunately, then a bunch of boring "real world" stuff (families, some health issues, actual jobs, and so on) got in the way, and that short break went on much longer than planned.

We also recognised that to achieve much of what we have in mind for the game, we need to backtrack and right our course before pushing ahead. The time pressure of a game jam can be a great way to get a project started, but it can also lead to working inefficiently because it doesn't feel like there is time to invest in doing things properly. So there has been a fair bit of work going into re-engineering the game code to allow it to be greatly optimized; assets are being properly organized in the repo; and we're starting to work on the toolchain to streamline things like the process of compiling levels.

All of this is necessary to remove some limitations that we were running into that were stopping us from adding things to the game, and it will make development faster and easier. It will be a little while longer before we're ready to drop another release, and realistically the pace of the project might be a bit slower than we originally dreamt of, but we're confident there will be progress.