I originally wanted to release the game in time for the 2022 Halloween Season. I started working on the game in June. That's about 5 months ago. It's a very simple game that builds off of what I did in Robot Ops, and so I truly believed I could finish it in time.

However, with 27 hours left until Halloween, it's clear that I didn't make the deadline.

I will need to take a hard look at my work during this period. Why did I fail to finish Balloon Ghost in time? There are three things that happened that I know took up a lot of my time, but I shouldn't have let them derail me so strongly. Many people are perfectly capable of managing more than just these few distractions while finishing projects on time and even early. I'm not beating myself up over it; I'm just trying to learn from patterns.

The updated timeline for the game's release is not yet defined. I don't want to give myself the comfort of time, and I want to keep the final development efforts somewhat on the "rushed" side in terms of urgency; the best ideas for the game came to me when I was under the self-imposed pressure to finish it in a few weeks, so I want to keep that creative energy alive as much as possible. At this point, I'm not going to add anything else into the game - I'm just going to use the extra time to finish in code what is already finished in my head. Optimistically, I think this could be a mid-November release. But realistically, I'm thinking it could be as late as December. 

I'll commit to a Fall 2022 release window just to keep it in line with last year's Fall 2021 release window for Robot Ops. That makes 2 games in 2 years, and while that's not super prolific, it's not bad, either.