It's a big map. A really big map. 

I've been asked about the map size compared to some of the screenshots and I want to give a better comprehension of just how big this game is going to be. I've gridded off the world map to roughly size the areas in order to get a better idea of how many to make and it comes to about 1,000. 
That's just a rough estimate while using this grid, obviously some areas are bigger than they seem and take up more gridspaces. In this image, there's a portion near the lake where I popped one of the areas in so you can see what I mean. I'm going to be making the game as close to the world map as possible, but there's sure to be some changes here and there as we go along and get feedback. 

Nerd time.

It took me roughly 3 hours to fully finish the first little area, but that includes setting up tiling and such. As for actually getting the details in after knowing what I wanted, it was ~30 minutes. Better but still that means that 1000 grids x 30 mins = 500 hours before the overworld is complete (~28% of the total dev time). I hope I can up my efficiency.
But hey, Lewd's got like 110+ characters to create + add expressions and potentially all of them are romanceable so, I may have the easier of these two responsibilities.
There's also a nice little pie chart of projected hours allocated to each part of this build. A total of ~1541 hours needed to complete this and with two of us putting 4 hours a day in, each, that's about 256 days until release. Not too bad, but it's still a long ways out. It would certainly be easier if both of us weren't working jobs AND in school.

Also also, I may be wildly over estimating how long it'll take us to do most of this, because as we get into the motions of it, it's bound to become faster. Time really will tell.

Test builds~

Now, I wanted to bring a new test build out soon, but I don't feel like I've made enough progress to warrant that just yet. Only real changes are that I have the grid placement down for machines, farming, trees and other objects to place on and trees are set more to areas and the pause menu is a little more polished. I'll work on the actual world and transitions between areas and once I get at least a few of those done, I'll bring a new test build.

Meanwhile

Between now and then, we'll be doing more updates here with how it's going and I won't add TOO MUCH before giving you a test build because I don't want to have to backtrack too far if it's just awful. I'm not prideful enough to think I can do this without your feedback guiding the right decisions. 

Til then, cheers and all that fun~