A letter of apology and an amended release date

Dearest Regency Lovers:

My name is Samantha, and I am the writer for Tea For Three Studios and Regency Love. I have interacted with some of you lovelies on a range of online media, and I, like the rest of the team, am very grateful for and humbled by your continued enthusiasm, support, and patience.

And it is with deep regret and apologies that I must entreat your patience for a little longer. As some of you may know, my two wonderful co-conspirators and I have been working on Regency Love in a part-time capacity, in addition to our various full-time jobs. My main commitment is to my funded PhD candidacy in Shakespeare studies, which I have been working on alongside Regency Love for the past two-ish years. Doing the PhD comes with a set of various deadlines and academic events which my co-conspirators and I consider when scheduling our work for Regency Love. When we decided on the 14 March release date last year, it was under the assumption that our work situations would remain unchanged—and of course, as with every deadline, we’d given ourselves a bit of a buffer in case life didn’t go entirely as planned (as it is wont to do).

Unfortunately, something propped up a few days ago that will require a lot more buffer than that for which we’d accounted. I received a last-minute offer to teach on a Renaissance course at my university, commencing next week. This will be quite a time commitment for the next four months, and is in addition to the PhD (time- and brain-consuming as it is) and my singing in a cathedral choir (ah, those long-lost Sundays). All three activities pay for my rent (and food!), and I simply cannot find the time to work on Regency Love nearly as much as I’d need in order to make the 14 March release.

After discussing this with Jenny and Melody, we have decided to push the release date to 1 May. I know this might come as a disappointment, and for that, I deeply apologise. But I also want to assure you that we do indeed have quite a bit of content in the works. On my part, most of the conversations have been written, and are currently being edited before they are ‘parsed’ so they can be put into the game, and then checked for any errors or typos. According to my trusty spreadsheet, I have written 83 conversations related to this new character, and 26 have been edited and parsed. Additional things I have to do/write include epilogues, several conversations for consistency, and editing/parsing new material for the side characters. I don’t want to bore you with any more details, but the general gist is this: the bulk of the content-y work has been done, but they need to be finessed and processed. And such things take time, which is currently rather lacking on my end.

(On a brighter note, Jenny and Melody are on schedule and have done some amazing work. Jenny’s new art is rather drool-worthy, and Melody’s been drawing some beautiful backgrounds as well as doing her super amazing code-wrangling and putting everything together.)

Thank you ever so much for being such wonderful Regency Lovers. I apologise again for having to push back the date, but 1 May isn’t too much further away. Besides, I can promise you there’s a Mr ______ waiting for you, as well as pre-release shinies available from 1 April (which will include unveiling the identity of said Mr ______). In the meantime, if you’d like any suggestions for Renaissance reading (or anything pre-20^th-century), you know where to find me, remaining humbly and faithfully yours,

Samantha