It's been well over a month since the last update here, but it's not been quiet for me.

Firstly, just after the v0.6.2 release, I got hospitalised with a kidney stone, and put under general anaesthetic so they could get a laser endoscope into me and have a game of Asteroids. Recovery from that procedure triggered a huge flare-up of my CFS, with the result that I've been struggling to do my paid job, with nothing left to give DragonMail.

Secondly, I'd already decided to join PROCJAM 2020, and although I was in no fit state to do anything serious, felt like I should produce something. So I extracted the random name generator from DragonMail into its own standalone project. Which did mean a tiny bit of restructuring in DragonMail itself, plus some learning experiences with C# and Godot.

And that experience of having a low-pressure deadline to get something completed caused me to revisit my old nemesis, Never Finishing Projects, in the context of DragonMail. There's so much I want to put into it, with increasing complexity, that it's clear that if I said "It's only going to be a full release if all of that's done" then development would inevitably drag on (dragon?) and on and that release would never happen. So I took a really critical look at what I had, and what I wanted to do, and realised that the next steps were all fairly major changes to the nature of the game. Which lead me to conclude that if I could just polish off a few remaining rough edges, I could think about having something in early 2021 which I could call a real release.

Is it really progress if I've not moved towards the goal, but moved the goal closer to me? It's all relative, innit.

(The image is a faked scene I did as a Christmas card. You only get snow on the tops of mountains, above the tree line, in-game.)