Hi! I guess it's been uhhh... a little while?

I've been keeping my head down working on the game and I want to give you an update on progress.
There are some pretty major things that have affected the timetable for the game.

Second Dreamer has switched engines!

So this is the first big one. Previously the game was running on a (heavily modified) version of RPG Maker MZ.
Given that I had completed a fair amount of the game in that engine I was resistant to switching engines so late but ultimately performance issues changed my mind. RPG Maker is fairy single threaded and this also applies to the 3D renderer I was using.

To give you an idea of how bad perf issues were in the main town you would get 20 or 40 frames per second if you were lucky on a Ryzen 5 2600.

The new engine is built off of MonoGame and has a toolchain specifically built for making 3D games.
That said aside from 3D assets I'm essentially starting the game over from scratch. Lesson learned I guess.

More people are working on the game now.

Even though work on the game has started from scratch there is kind of an upside to this. I'm no longer working on everything myself as I have somebody working on 3D models and another trying to break every build they get their hands on.

I'll do another post so they can introduce themselves.

Conclusion

While things didn't pan out exactly to plan I still have a demo slated for this year.  I'm pretty close to having a version of the game I'd feel comfortable with people playing. There's still a lot of work to be done but it's still closer to being done than it was previously.

I've attached a bunch of various screenshots from the new version of the game to this post. Let me know if you have any feedback.