Why does it take so long for a TIME COWBOY Era to release?

Welcome back,

as it turns out joining one forum can really inspire you to do a lot of stuff, which I’ll get into on a different day.

Instead, I’ll talk about the process of creating Eras and why they take so long.
But first,

The Timeline.

The Development Timeline of Eras so far is pretty strange.

As you’d kinda expect the first era to take more time. That is not the case,
Era 1 took about 2 months to create from March to April and that was with developing the game simultaneously.

How this happened is a mix of pure luck, some planning and what I like to call New Project High.

New Project High is when you begin a project and everything begins clicking, and so you start spending hours a day just hacking away at this project cause everything is new, every problem has a complex solution.

Of course as development continues, this high runs off.

That’s pretty much what happened.
Era 1/Demo released and that high wore off. Come Era 2, which took 3 1/2 months to complete from Mid-May to August. Era 3 began development around September after a short hiatus, and is now taking 2 months, but is expected to release around January - February.

So why is it taking so long?

Burnout and Motivation, plus my increasing standards.

Burnout is a real pain in the ass, it comes at the worst times and overall is a nuisance.

After the release of the Demo and updates and the Steam Demo Re-Release, I got burnt out and didn’t work on the game for a couple weeks.

And I knew that due to this, I wouldn’t be able to get Era 2 out on time, so I had to delay the release.

But of course that wasn’t the only reason. My standards after Era 1 rose a lot, as in my head every era has to be different, it has to be bigger and better than the last.

Which is probably why Era 2 has the most open space out of all the eras right now. Same with Era 3, not only does it have to be all of that, it now has to look like a city.
That combined with my motivation being low due to my inability to disconnect it from the bad performance of sales and the general process hasn’t helped either.

Speaking of the process, it’s pretty involved.

The Process

Every Era is split up into 5 pieces.
First Half: Intro (Level 1-4)
Second Half: Ramp Up (Level 5-7)
Special Level: Level 8
All Out/Arena: Level 9
Boss Fight: Level 10

The longest part of this process is the first and second half, as the best way I can put it is that it’s the main meal and the rest is the dessert.
Plus Each Era needs:

And being just one person, that’s already a big scope. If anything, 2-4 months dev time is a miracle, but still these Eras do take a long time to make.

Despite all of this, I still enjoy working on Time Cowboy and I want to make sure that it’s my best game yet, especially if it’s gonna be my only Steam game for a long, long while.

Thank you for reading.