I have never liked estimation of completion time for AwAm as we don't know the intentions of the author....
Not to be a negative-nancy but, we kind of do.
With every update he talks about more renders (good), higher quality and detail per render (good-ish) and how much time per day he's spending in front of the PC working on said renders (not good).
He looks at the expanding time-frame per update as an inevitability, which would be fine but updates are only going to get more detailed as the twisting story-lines get more complex and we start getting to the sexy scenes where people really
want to see lots and lots of renders.
I'm still in the camp that he could and should hire help to make the game.
The main argument he has against this is it doesn't work with his writing process, for those not aware, he writes and edits as he renders.
He's never gone into specifics - but I assume he starts each scene with a rough outline detailing things like;
Each characters' emotional beats (eg. Sophia ends scene angry at Ellie)
Information to be conveyed (eg. Sam's band playing tomorrow night)
Branching-Path references (eg. Sophia tells Dylan about Casino night while in bath: Debt answer vs No-Debt answer)
And other shit I'm not thinking of...
But the actual dialogue, the back and forth (not to mention the Monologue/narrator) he seems to write on the fly - so when he writes a line of dialogue for Dylan asking Sophia "
Will... you be taking ALL your clothes off in the tanning Salon?" he can pause the writing and say 'Right, will need an extra render of Sophia with her face set to
impatient/consternation, to match her response.'
Again, this is all speculation.
Giving rendering duties to another person wouldn't allow him to fiddle with the writing as he goes, he'd have to write the whole scene from start to finish, including variations for different choices and branching-path elements, then storyboard it, then send it to the other person/people.
And I think the other thing worth mentioning - L&P... likes doing the rendering and the writing - it's not hard to tell from his posts that he enjoys that shit, it's probably his favourite part of making the game. He wouldn't have started this if he didn't like the process.
Hiring someone to do a portion of the rendering for him would take some of the fun out of the experience.
Don't get me wrong, I still think he should do it, but I get where he's coming from when he says he doesn't want to.
If for no other reason than because, as Bacchus pointed out, he's looking at a best case scenario of working on this game for the next
decade, minimum.
Ten years of slowly telling
one story, ten years of reading shit-posts on sites like this, ten years of dancing politely around Patreon's increasingly obtuse rules...