As an independent game developer, I think it really helps to acknowledge failures, and share journeys as games progress. In this short post (That doubles as a re-announcement) I'm sharing the journey this project that has been with me for nearly my entire adult life has taken. 

• 2017 - "Another Sad Chronicle Involving Icons" begins development, an ASCII walking simulator designed to work through some personal issues
• 2018 - "Sad Chronicle" expands in scope and becomes a full turn-based RPG
• 2019 - Re-announced as Sequestered. ASCII artwork is dropped in favour of scruffy hand-drawn sprites. As the year progresses, Sequestered slowly falls into a hiatus due to work.
• 2020 (February) - Sequestered is accepted into the EGX Leftfield collection, one of my proudest moments as a developer
• 2020 (March) - COVID lockdowns hit. EGX is cancelled. Work/life balance gets atrocious with a remote job. Hiatus begins, and Sequestered sits on the backburner as I enter an exploratory period, working closer with teams on other projects.
• 2021 - I steadily realise that what I want to achieve with Sequestered isn't quite possible with the approach I was taking up until this point.
• 2022 - "The White Owl" enters development, a project in which I hope to finally build a shader stack worthy of my plans with Sequestered. Alongside this, I finally enter a position in the games industry and learn from professionals how projects should be better architected. This quickly makes the old Sequestered codebase obsolete.
• 2023 - "The White Owl" releases, leaving me with "MonoMesh", my black and white shader stack ready to go into Sequestered at long last.
• 2024 - I get laid off, giving me the time I need to focus on my own work.

For the handful of people following my Itch for this game alone, I'd like to take this as a moment to re-announce Sequestered as a developer who finally feels ready to tackle this project with greater care, attention, maturity, and skill. This project hasn't left my mind once in all the time I've been picking away at it, I've just never felt truly ready to tackle it until now.

To create a sense of accountability and progress that doesn't hold me to the "Demo/Full release" schedule, the new release order will look something like this:

• 0.0.1 Vertical Slice - a basic playable outline to represent what the game should look and feel like, to be released on Itch.
• 0.1.0 Demo - the opening playable segment of the game, with UI and gameplay representative of the actual final game.
• 0.2.0 Chapter 1 - The first chapter of the game with fully featured gameplay. After this point, the game will be considered "early access" with a Steam release alongside Itch, with each chapter released as and when they are ready.
• 1.0 - Every chapter of the game complete. Game can be played start to finish.

I look forward to absolutely failing to deliver and sagely nodding at this post in 10 years. Thanks for your interest in this mess.