You can see the title of this post, can't you?

I apologize, that's hardly a way to open this topic on. To be honest, I've needed to talk about this for some time now. I've done a poor job communicating with not only my team, but also the fans of this project, so... Here goes.

Development of BEYOND THE HARBOR is on hiatus as of this post. There are a myriad of reasons for this, and I'll go into them in detail below.

• Mental health

Those of you that know me more personally may have noticed some strange behavior out of me in the last few months. I apologize for any slips in my public persona, but I've been a mess mental health-wise since August. I won't go into detail here, but I've made some terrible life choices and made some incredibly powerful enemies in the Visual Novel community as a result. I cannot continue living on edge like this, I'd like to distance myself as far as possible from those people and those spaces. I hope you'll forgive my vagueness, but for my own safety I refuse to say anything more on this matter as it develops.

• Art

BEYOND THE HARBOR has always been a collaborative project. While I've funded it myself as the game's writer and director, I've had a relatively large team (by VN standards) to coordinate between tasks. This has been... Challenging, to say the least. I went into this project without the proper planning, and as a result, I now need to fund a full art overhaul. Why is this? 

Consistency, mostly. Having four different artists that are all on commission, available at different times (or not available at all in one case), has lead to a bizarre mismatch of quality between art in updates. Artstyles are different, and inconsistent between each other. This has lead to an overall amateurish project that I'm regularly frustrated with. The only way forward is to pick a single artist and pay to completely overhaul the game, which is a great segway into the next section...

• Money

To be frank, I was too ambitious in my spending. I can barely afford to continue the project as is, let alone pay for an entire art overhaul. I've asked for opinions on this, and the one I regularly heard was: "Why don't you just open a Patreon?"

I'm sorry, but when i set out to work on this project in the first place, I promised not just my audience, but also myself that I would not accept any financial support for BEYOND THE HARBOR. Every time someone asked me if they could donate, I suggested they keep their money, or give it to another creator. I remain firm in this stance, BTH is, and always will be, nonprofit.

• General Enthusiasm

I'll be frank here, despite working on this project for over a full year of my life, I'm just not as passionate as I used to be. Behind the scenes the game has weathered disaster after disaster, my poor choices here have truly come back to bite me in the ass time and time again. What I used to associate with joy and optimism I now look at with dread and anxiety.  Thinking about the state of this project puts me on edge to such an extreme degree I often break into tears. This isn't a fun hobby for me anymore, and it hasn't been for a while.

So... With all of that out of the way, what's next?

Well... Something, surely. 

I never stopped writing. Writing is my hobby, and creating games is a recent passion I feel like I can really only dive deeper into. Is there something else on the horizon? Maybe. Don't expect any announcements, I learned my lesson about announcing things too early, if you see something new from me, the thing will likely already be playable.

So, to close off this morbid little dev post, I want to give a little thank you to the people who've been supporting me from the start. I'm sorry if I ever disappointed you. To everyone that has ever worked on BTH, I'm sorry I let you down. And finally to anyone who's ever read BTH, watched a YouTube video, engaged in theorycrafting, talked about the game *anywhere*... Thank you. You are forever the thing that kept me going.

- Harmonious