Not sure what being "dominant" has to do with creativity, but this game certainly has a very passive MC. He is there to witness the world and story. Players are just along for the ride.
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I’ve looked at the progress tracker and I think that the team doesn’t work slowly, but rather that they work rarely.
1) Cannot really comment on Roberto (story writer) other than that his parts were completed first.
2) Geeseki seems to work quickly for 2-3 days in a row then do nothing for a week or more.
3) Darkmage did exactly nothing for at least two months (Oct 02) and it is their contribution which was missing from update 31 afaik. At some point their part (coding in all the CG/sprites/assets Geeseki drew) was simply moved to v0.32 and v0.31 was "completed" without it.
From this I’m assuming that Geeseki still has at least a part-time job and just works on this occasionally. If Geeseki did this game full time, they might complete the work of a month in a single week. That tracks with the progress compares to other games. Instead of committing full time, Geeseki used the Patreon money to hire help, which I find very understandable considering the less than 4k the game makes on patreon.
Anyway, this might explain some of the issues we have regarding slow and buggy releases. Geeseki only works on the game ~8 days a month and the programmer he hired to help up and vanished. Ergo v.0.30 turned out as the most buggy release yet and v.0.31 is (probably) very lacking.
All of this is, of course, speculation. I haven’t even played v.0.31 so I probably shouldn’t comment on it.
Edit: Progress days:
Sep 5 (moved a single task)
Sep 27-Oct 2 (MomxSis storyline = v.030)
Oct 16 (marking main story writing complete + housekeeping = creating and moving trello tasks)
Oct 21 , 23, 27-30, Nov 2, 4, 6 (working on new stores/items, = New v.031 content)
Nov 6, 10 , 16, 17, 19, 23-25 (v.031 patreon voted scenes + main story writing + housekeeping for v.032)
Nov 25-26, 28, Dec 1-2 (housekeeping for v.0.32 + bug reports + final v.031 wrap-up)
Dec 16-17 (working on new locations+characters = v.032 content)
Summary:
Sep ~4 days of work
Oct: ~7 days of work
Nov: ~11 days of mixed work
Dec: ~2 days of work so far.
Amount of work days may be skewed for Darkmage/Roberto since items are only marked complete by Geeseki. This amount of work fits someone doing it beside another job and/or someone having other issues keeping them from working on it most days.
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On a happier note, it seems that the next update will (=is supposed to) feature:
1) The office building including 9 different locations, new characters and a glory hole.
2) The "Up Town", featuring 7 new locations.
3) New music for the club.
4) A few new shopping menus (v.031 introduced new shops)
5) Theoretically, inclusion of a lot of art for Lashey and the main story… if Darkmage ever comes back.
Missing is the CG for the MomxSis story, which has been pushed back again. Probably waiting for whenever Darkmage is done with the previous parts…
(If you haven’t noticed yet: Yes, I do like lists and figuring out how stuff turned out as it did/how things could have been.)
