Hi everyone,
I hope you're all having a fantastic weekend.
I want to start by apologizing. I seriously underestimated how much work these reworks would end up taking.What started out as a simple remaster of the early chapters has gradually evolved into something much bigger. I'm not just touching up old content anymore. I'm rewriting every single line of dialogue, redesigning scenes, adding new scenes, adding new choices, improving character interactions, and remaking every image completely from the ground up.
The biggest challenge is that I keep finding ways to make scenes better.
A conversation that originally took a handful of renders now turns into a fully realized sequence with multiple camera angles, expressions, transitions, and additional dialogue. The result is a much more immersive experience, but it also means production times have increased.
To put things into perspective, the original Chapter II contained roughly 95 images in total.
The café scene alone in the new Chapter II is larger than the entirety of the old chapter.
That's the scale of these reworks.
The downside is that I've been working myself into the ground. Since I'm handling everything mysefl. Writing, rendering, editing, coding, UI design, testing... the workload has become pretty intense. Some days I wake up, sit down at my desk, start working, and before I know it the entire day has disappeared.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that I barely remember what the outside world looks like at this point. That said, despite how exhausting it has been, I'm incredibly happy with the results.
The difference in quality between the original content and the reworked version is honestly night and day. The pacing is stronger, the characters feel more natural, the choices have more impact, and the visual presentation is on a completely different level.
I think it's becoming increasingly clear that Shadows of Ambition isn't like most AI-assisted visual novels. Every scene is carefully planned, rewritten, rendered, tested, and refined until I'm happy with it. The tools help speed up parts of the process, but an enormous amount of time still goes into creating something that feels polished and unique.
The good news is that Chapter II is progressing extremely well. There's just the two NSFW scenes left. I'm trying to do as much as I can, but to be honest, I'm afraid of a burn out. I'm bad at deadlines and setting dates for myself, not going to lie, but at the same time, I don't want to rush towards a deadline and make the game worse for it. I've seen a lot of concerns and comments about my plans on reworking these early chapters. "Why bother?". I'll just say this one last time, I've gambled on doing this. I had a full-time job and worked on Shadows of Ambition whenever I had spare time. However, it wasn't healthy. I worked for 20 hours a day, seven days a week. Whatever social life or free time I had, I sacrificed for the game. I made the decision towards the end of 2025 to do this full-time. I've been loving working on the game, but I noticed that I still spend way too much time every day working on the game, because if I don't, I feel like I'm letting all of you down. The issue is, Patreon subs between updates drop quite a bit (Around 65% of subs leave). Meaning if I don't release an update every couple of months, I lose a lot of money. The reason why I'm doing these reworks, is to hopefully get a somewhat successful steam launch. Why? To fund the project moving forward. I want to be able to work on the game and not be stressed about making ends meet every month and more importantly, I want to be able to do this for the foreseeable future. I love what I do and I feel like I've grown a lot in the year I've been developing this game. My goal remains the same as it has always been: to make Shadows of Ambition the best game I can possibly make.
Thank you all for your patience, support, and encouragement. Seeing your comments, messages, and excitement for the project is what keeps me pushing forward during these marathon development sessions.
Until next time,
— AbyssGames