💎 Hello, everyone! I hope you are all having a great 2025 so far.⭐

First of all, I want to apologize for the lack of communication from me outside of my Discord server. I have been genuinely swamped throughout this year so far to the point that I barely have time for my other hobbies, like gaming or cooking (I have unfortunately been eating so much delivery food... my poor bank account...) I also used to have more time to yap in other AVN servers, but I haven't really had time for that lately either. My life has been diverging from the AVN community and development, which is pretty sad, but I hope to get back into the swing of things soon! That is to say, I do not intend to abandon my project. I am just simply too busy suffering with adulthood right now.

Please keep in mind that STELLA development is a hobby for me at the moment, so it's really hard to find time to work on it, especially after clocking in 8+ hour days of my real job with how busy my projects have been lately. Followed by going to the gym daily, coming home, cooking dinner, doing chores, etc. Adulting is hard, and nobody told me that the real struggle of being an adult was figuring out what the hell I was going to eat for dinner. Every. Single. Day. I am only 26 years old, so... only 60-80 more years of dinners left to worry about LOL. But besides the monotonous and stable schedule, I am happy with where I am. My life feels comfortable and safe with my job, significant other, and two adorable cats. It's just unfortunate that I don't have as much time to work on STELLA nowadays since I am actually working during my working hours instead of having free-time to develop like I did in 2024.

And if I don't have the freedom to work on development during working hours, then the other opportunity is after work. But after long work days, I just want to unwind with some gaming and whatnot rather than trying to use my creative brain and develop. I feel like it's a disservice to scrounge up motivation or creativity to work on it, which will definitely hinder the quality of my work. It doesn't help that I usually finish all of my daily routines at 8pm, so I only have a few hours before it's bed time to restart the daily cycle.

But it's not all bad news. I went dark the last few months because I had like five terribly busy projects back-to-back. I am still wrapping up three more this month, but it should be smooth sailing afterwards. Thanks to a recent promotion, I am going to be responsible for only one, big project rather than all these smaller projects. So, the scheduling/workload should HOPEFULLY not be as bad, meaning I can have more time to actually work on development again.

Again, I apologize for being completely inactive outside of my Discord server. I've been holding off on posting anything official like this since I hate posting something that ultimately boils down to "lol nothing got done. no update any time soon. been dying irl bc busy, sorry!" But that's a stupid thought, and I should definitely let you guys know I'm alive and well. I want to say thank you to everyone who has left heartwarming comments with me, even 8 months after my release of my 0.1 debut. I am glad to see the beloved project I poured a lot of time and love into being paid back generously with everyone's support! We are already almost at 500 members on Discord with a pleasantly surprising amount of downloads/followers on itch.io. It makes me incredibly happy knowing so many of you enjoyed it this much to support me and my work. Thank you for being patient, and I hope to finally get the time to work on an amazing 0.2 update you all deserve to enjoy as soon as possible!

Much love,

🐣 eggrik