What Happened.

Hi. Let's talk about why the recently released update took almost an entire year.

But first, I need to make something clear: this will not be CaptainCaption's therapy hour or even the shouting cave of venting to my echo. I'm aware that I overshare myself in a very personal way and from that bear some responsibility for leaving the infrastructure of pipelines for others forming parasocial attachments toward me that are harmful for everyone involved, and I'm on very high alert for that in the wake of Press-Switch entering an indefinite hiatus due to its dev being harassed by a stalker.

Some people have accused me of being emotionally manipulative for sharing things I want people to read but don't want them to comment on (put a pin in that), but I think there's been a fundamental misunderstanding of my motives. Almost everything I have ever written has been for myself. It's not merely a way to sort out my thoughts into words or a graffiti mark that will outlive me, and it's definitely not something as vain as a practiced boast of my own writing skills or a cry for help. Sure, maybe some of it was my therapy to form thoughts I could understand and an oblivious dance with my unacknowledged genderfluid identity (perhaps even a tango), but that is still a self-contained exercise where the most important member of the audience and the one I am trying to impress the most is myself. For me, writing is an exercise I find fundamentally enjoyable in the mere act of doing it. I'd still be doing this even if it wasn't my job and if nobody was reading it but me, but I feel beyond lucky that enough people like it enough for it to be my job.

But my job isn't to blog about my life, especially the very private and personal matters I have overshared. To some extent, I think the incentive for me to overshare for no other reason than because I like writing so much interacts badly with me writing what I know (and do not know) in ways that are damaging to my mental health as an act that fuels itself and uses myself for that fuel. Writing privately to myself has been far more helpful for my mental health than dramatic and depressing tirades in the re:Dreamer Discord server's semi-private vent channel.

Bottling negativity up is a big part of the reason things got so bad for me in 2023 and much of 2024 (but put another pin in that for now), but I'm finally starting to see that I've been overcompensating in the opposite direction in what my therapist and I have determined is likely a trauma response. This makes sense to me as I already know I have a notable stress response of verbose and snarky cleverness, and much like Spider-Man, the protective pseudo-anonymity of a masked persona lets me speak with a cocky confidence and safety. When things have been bad for me, I've found escapism from reframing the events. My parent's abuse of me gets retold as almost comical supervillain antics like some throwaway visual gag in a cartoon or an investigation into family history to chain actions into a retrospective context so I don't have to think about my reality of being in such an awful situation. It's turned into an event in a vacuum to prevent it from being connected to other events and forming a pattern of abuse.

Hell, even this explanation can't fully escape getting personal, but instead of trying to find cleverness in making the obvious joke of a literary parallel, I'll link to something Natalie of Natalie.TF said in her 2024 review of re:Dreamer:

Now, you might be wondering what does this have to do with re:Dreamer? To which I say… re:Dreamer is Cap’s game. Cap has overshared and put so much of themself into this game that it’s impossible for me to separate the two from each other, and the more one understands about them, the more one understands about re:Dreamer. The more sense it all makes… The more Cap shares details about themself (sic) through Patreon posts and author's notes— the more I read and re-read through them— the more apparent these overlaps become. It is through this background, through these paratextual additions, that re:Dreamer becomes that much of a richer, well rounded, experience. And knowing all this, knowing the background, it makes re:Dreamer something dearly unique.

I won't dispute that, but I am not the main character of my story, and my own life isn't merely a story. There's so much more to me than the words on the page or a set of character sprites used to spice up the developer commentary. That is neither a meaningful nor accurate way to know me, and as I've come to realize, I don't think it's how I want others to know me or what I want them to remember me by. If I were so vapid, I doubt I'd have been able to do this for almost six years, and I'd have been what people wanted me to be instead of the multifaceted weirdo I am.

Of course I know how to make amusing anecdotes out of events in my own life. I think I've proven I know how to write those well, but that personal writing isn't merely not my job but something that eats up the limited time I have to put into making this visual novel. I have a responsibility of transparency to share what goes on behind the curtain where that visual novel is made, yet what goes on inside and around that person pulling the levers should only be shared insofar as they relate to my ability to pull those levers and how I pull them.

My health is the most obvious of these, but I write an adult gender bender visual. My own gender (genderfluid), my own sexuality (bisexual disaster), and my generalized views of both are highly relevant factors to how I write that story. There are limits and boundaries I need to actually respect (yours and my own), but you obviously don't have to read ant of it and I still see much of that as being worth sharing for the layer of context they add because my real-world experiences inform what I write and how I write it to not only make my writing more accurate but emotionally impactful with a realistic progression of the story and character growth.

My own dramatic realization of being bisexual and how it happened in the loudest way possible in something I can only describe as pseudo-estrus was such a unique experience I could never have understood if I hadn't had it happen to me and is absolutely something I am going to use as a reference material for at least part of Zach's similar realization in Keisuke's route.

In way too many posts to link to a single one of them, my issues with my own large chest and the unprepared learning curve of safely binding it until I turned something that had once been a huge obstacle that risked my health if I did it wrong into a minor inconvenience I've gotten used to and accepted the necessity of is something that will inform Zach's on views on the subject, but with the added evolutions I do not have of being okay with presenting as a woman and not enjoying being seeing as a man if this character decides she isn't one.

I cannot even begin to properly explain how oblivious I was to creating my own increasingly elaborate and painful gender envy trap for almost a decade straight. I didn't arrive at the outcome of being a binary transgender woman many around me predicted, but I intimately know the layered mindsets of someone who drops loud hints pointing to unanswered questions of their identity without noticing, realizes everything in a dizzying rush that makes everything make so much sense despite its equally dizzying complexity, mortified embarrassment for not noticing all the clue that were right there, the confusion of working backward by combing through a mountain of suspicious breadcrumbs from your entire life with no certainty about what is a coincidence and what is a clue (let alone a cause, contribution, correlation, or symptom), and the weary frustration that comes from slowly realizing that you haven't solved yourself so much as you've started to openly ask yourself who you are within a changed topic that you are even less familiar with that will give no easy answers, and in case you haven't noticed, Zach is someone on that arc as it gets taken to extreme lengths for more compelling dramatic irony and a more satisfying payoff.

The nature of physical health, mental health, gender identity, and sexuality make them some of the most personal subjects possible to talk about. Zach is a fictional character designed to be laid bare with every card on the table and no privacy or room to hide from the reader, and it's a large part of what I think makes him "work" as a relatable character despite being an excessively detailed person with so much thought put into the smallest parts of him that people have continuously accused him of being my self-insert (he genuinely isn't, and I'd point you to the dozens of gender bender stories on Scribble Hub if you want to see what an actual self-insert looks like).

I am not a fictional character, but in many instances, I've been treating how I share myself in a similar way. I regret so openly divulging myself (and my physical health in particular), and while I think a redaction isn't practical at this point beyond just the fact that my declining health as an almost entirely solo developer is incredibly important to disclose as a part of setting realistic expectations for re:Dreamer's development so a prospective reader can make an informed decision about whether or not they want to even start reading a game with slow updates that will likely never be finished, I can still limit the scope of what is shared. That personal transparency and context will still exist for those who would like to understand that reasoning behind design choices and as what I still consider to be a necessary part of my job of leaving a fully open disclaimer, but it won't be hidden within mountains of irrelevant crap that ate up huge swathes of development hours to make.

Nevertheless, parts of that stubborn commitment to openness are a tightrope walk between sharing too little and sharing too much where I have a bad habit of leaning toward the latter, so please bear with me as I better figure out the balancing act. I'm the only one in the driver's seat and I can never truly see the view of what I am doing from outside no matter how many mirrors I use. In lieu of an engaged producer with veto power, I need people to speak up and shout at me if I'm getting off track because I often fail to realize when I've drifted or fallen into a coffee-induced fugue state behind the wheel.

Okay, all that being said, let's finally get into what the hell happened.

Like I said almost verbatim before, it's as simple and boring as that cat scratch fever I got from my apartment's flea infestation in early October 2024 had a shorter incubation period than the mononucleosis I also got from the same infection vector, so my heavily weakened immune system meant virus dug much deeper into my body than it normally would have, and combined with my other health issues, I got hit hard and it took me ages to recover.

I've been trying to be better about thoroughly documenting my relevant health issues for transparency about development, to the point that I even shared the lab reports of my blood showing the bacteria that cause cat scratch fever and the virus that causes mononucleosis. I had a few times where I dreaded giving another update that stated yes, I was still sick, but for the most part, I think I did a decent job of keeping people appraised with about monthly updates, and unlike my corticobasal syndrome and my mental health, I more than understood it enough to share confidently without the caveats of those more complex issues my doctors aren't even entirely in consensus about.

I think I am finally recovered fully from mono, but it's hard to correctly remember what my prior energy level even was to judge if I've returned to that baseline. Even more crippling than my constant fatigue from mono was the holes it punched in my memory. I had months where I barely even remembered what I had done the previous day, let alone the previous week. Groceries would go bad because I had either misremembered how recently I'd bought them or forgotten I'd even bought them at all. I had to write down when I took my medications and fed my cats because I was so prone to strongly assuming I either had or hadn't with confusing inconsistency. I'd get up from a task and leave it unfinished for days because I forgot about it. I'd space out and do the same thing over and over again.

Suffice it to say, it was bad. Far from not firing on all cylinders, a lot of this time was spent in terror that my corticobasal syndrome had progressed to the point of senility. I had very little awareness of the world beyond my bed, and my focus was so shot that I didn't even have the small comfort of being able to storyboard ideas for re:Dreamer in my head or from writing just so I would feel less useless as if I wasn't rotting away. The biggest thing I can fault myself for during this was failing to learn from the lessons of many repeated attempts of pushing myself toward work too hard out of impatience and feelings of worthlessness and setting my recovery a few steps back whenever I inevitably crashed instead of taking the time to properly rest.

With the exception of most of October and I think all of November, I still had good days now and then. I could get small amounts of work done, buy groceries, do light chores, go out for some errands, and generally just do the things I needed to keep myself and my cats alive. But until late June or so, those good days were unpredictable events I couldn't plan for, and how much I could even do before I collapsed seemed almost random. I could sometime rebound with coffee and a shower, but I had no way of knowing if that'd be the case or I'd be stuck in bed while simultaneously wired and tired. I had to cut a lot of days out for errands short because I was starting to become so exhausted and half-lucid that I was afraid of driving more.

Most of this past year were spent in a limbo where I barely had enough mental faculties to do something as basic as laying in bed and pressing up and down on a Nintendo DS as I grinded Pokemon I didn't actually care much about as part of a breeding program with even less rigor than the bunk science of eugenics while barely being able to pay attention to YouTube videos I put on in the background of all kinds of subjects just to distract myself from feeling like I was stuck in limbo. I cannot even begin to calculate how many Pokemon with imperfect IVs I threw off a cliff like a Spartan warrior holding an imperfect infant nor how many hours of Star Wars lore videos I passively consumed because many of them had a droning repetition with regurgitated and overlapping points that I could easily follow along. You could give me pretty much any topic related to Star Wars, and I could probably spend hours talking about it in detail. I know the plot of all the Disney live-action shows besides Andor (as friends have assured me that one is actually good and I've been trying to avoid spoilers when I inevitably get coaxed into watching it), as well as their extensive flaws and even ideas of how to fix them. I have not watched them outside of small clips in YouTube videos, I do not have a Disney+ subscription or incentive to pirate the shows to watch them, and I honestly don't even like Star Wars.

I feel like I was trapped in stasis for an entire year that even now doesn't quite seem like it was real yet is still time I can't get back, and all I got were the consolation prizes of a really good Tyranitar and Metagross, encyclopedic knowledge of a franchise I don't enjoy beyond knowing exactly what parts of its decades of stupid crap to call out and how to call it out (recent favorites are "Senator Palpatine really liked the bottomless pits of the Naboo plasma refinery Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Darth Maul fought in and made sure the Death Star ended up with a bunch of pointless narrow catwalks with no railings over huge chasms," "the Rebel Alliance's base on Hoth got found and invaded by the Galactic Empire during A New Hope and yet the Rebels went back to it for the start of The Empire Strikes Back because they assumed the Empire wouldn't check the same place twice," "the second Death Star blew up only minutes before the bounty hunter droid IG-88B completed a software takeover of the battle station would have been the start of a very bloody droid uprising," "everyone seen in the Mos Eisley cantina during A New Hope have gotten extensively detailed backstories over the decades and that human with the melted face who was harassing Luke is actually an insanely evil plastic surgeon who has committed an unbelievably amount of atrocities," and all of the many ways Darth Sidious was extremely close to being discovered before Order 66 which were all narrowly avoided due to combinations of blind luck and an incredible amount of incompetence") ((which I will definitely be trying to transplant onto Zach as he is exactly the type of person who'd watch movies in a franchise he dislikes to hone and expand that dislike given that he's already told Britney he's read the Bible just to refute it with better arguments)), and a spiritual connection to George Lucas as a fellow possessive auteur with harmful amount of perfectionism who desperately needs someone around to restrain my worst creative intinctions of goofy arbitrary additions made for my own amusement. Much like in the wake of my bullshit Games Done Quick ban from AGDQ2017 over accusations I couldn't contest of pulling a power strip and somehow damaging a row of PCs in their practice room, I hadn't even gotten the expected shirt for the event.

Bluntly, I don't think I need to further justify how awful this past year has been. I've kept you all in the loop enough to show that with updates written during it instead of being retrospective. I often feel as if I am so unlucky as if the God I don't believe in has dislike of me personally, but going into a long-winded rant about how my views of death developed during a year of misery wouldn't be relevant nor insightful, so I'll pivot to a less depressing focus to end on a positive note.

The last year was bad, but I weathered it better than expected for a number of reasons. The antidepressants I got on were incredibly helpful for my mental health to the point that I often caught myself thinking they'd given me my life back even if that life was on pause. Other medications have made my right arm more usable and toned down a lot of the pain that would usually make me spiral when it got too bad. My affectionate cats were an outlet for a love that made me get out of bed for them to make sure they were healthy and happy, and in turn they made me healthier and happier and were tremendous wards against feelings of isolation as a sick person who lives by themselves and works from home. My friends kept me motivated to hold myself together and convinced me numerous times that the struggle I was in was worth it. Seeing my sister and her husband happy made me feel happy for them.

I'm thankful for all of that, and I am thankful for the people who read this game and had more patience than I did during this last year.

And, well… I'm cutting this off here. I had points I wanted to get to about events that further shaped my views of gender and sexuality (broadly and of my own), and as much as I think sharing that matters, I have a lot of work to catch up to and those details can wait for another day when I'm not crunching to get back up to speed with development and make up for this lost time.

Take care of yourselves, and I'll see you again in due time.