It’s funny how knowing about various development pitfalls doesn’t stop you from falling into them yourself. I’ve watched many devlogs where at least one of these came up, and thought, “now I’ll know what to look out for so I can avoid these problems”. And now here I am, with the same problems slowing down the development of dahlia.

The initial pace was really fast. I was creating features and solving challenges, dahlia was on track to be released soon, as I kept saying. And then I went silent.

I had been sacrificing some code and product quality for speed due to the pressure I was putting on myself. I have many plans for dahlia, and having to fix poor code later on is not one of them, so I started refactoring my code. This is where scope creep came in. I found there were several things that could be improved, more features that could be added that were not initially planned for and the editor needed to look better.

I sometimes have a nasty habit of visualizing the completed project and trying to build it all at once without breaking it up into realisitic components. As you’d imagine, I end up overwhelmed and lose motivation.

I didn’t know what to tell you. I didn’t feel like touching the squishy codebase and was tired of grinding with no real results. Those of you waiting for the release of dahlia might not be many, but it would really suck to disappoint you.

I love transparency. I’ve always wondered why developers stayed silent for so long and left their communities in the dark, and now that I’ve done the same thing, I realize how easy it is to do so, and I’m really sorry.

As of the state of dahlia, I’m in the process of doing a partial rewrite. I’ll also add particle and sprite-animation editors, which I feel are basic features that any editor should have. I thank you for your patience and for reading this far. Hopefully, the first version of dahlia will be out by the end of 2023.