Warning: Wall of text incoming. Not for the faint of heart. You've been warned.
As someone who is trying to develop a game of his own but encounters different problems along the way I can relate to Real life stuff happening or different technical challenges.
Sure, we all have our problems. Not saying L&P is excluded from that, but most people couldn't just stay home and tell their boss that real life problems are unfortunately making it impossible for them to work a couple weeks. People work their usual 8-9 hours a day and then take care of personal shit. That's life. But no, not for L&P obviously. He acts like RL issues take up 24 hours of his day, and he's pulling that off quite often. It's bullshit, and everyone knows it.
When back in 2021 new devcycles wouldn't see any progress for like 2 weeks after a release, nobody said a thing as updates still consisted of 1/3rd of a PD. But now the guy releases 10% of a PD and still there's 0 progress for roughly 2 weeks after each release. That alone amounts to 20 weeks (5 months!), give or take, of ZERO progress for this current PD, which at this point is gonna take more than 2 years. Previously that would have been ~6 weeks. The guy is just getting lazier by the year.
As for the technical stuff, there shouldn't be anything too crazy in this update as the issues he mentioned are related to the hottub part. We've had pretty much the exact same thing at the end of PD12, where it apparently wasn't an issue. There's no animations either, so animating liquids can't be the problem here. Dylan part01 already took place in a bathtub, so what else is different? The lighting? Again, same thing as the last event of PD12.
So now I'm wondering why L&P said that RENDERING of all things is gonna cause a delay when he's barely able to create a handful of scenes a day. The guy has two computers with a total of 4x 3090Ti's and he can't render his shit over night? There's several days, sometimes a week between progress on CS and RS on the bars. That should never be a thing. They should always progress together. Infact, he should delete the second progress bar alltogether it's so dumb. And if you work on your own game, you KNOW that. But as mentioned many times before, his progress bars are meaningless. They do not represent the actual progress made. It's just so his supporters have something to look at while waiting for their fix.
However since he is getting so much money from his patrons he should do one of two things:
1. Hire people to help him if he doesn't have the time to properly invest in the game
2. If he is so anal about noone else touching the game that he can't seem to be able to hire people, he should just disable his patron for the periods he is not working on the game. I've seen plenty of developers do that and it seems like the right move to make if you can't work on the game.
1. L&P's been saying that for the past 6 years almost. He even has it as a Patreon goal, which was reached several years ago. Never did anything to fulfill it, yet comes out every single year again telling his supporters that "this year I'm gonna hire help", then a couple months later says the exact same crap every single time. "Can't find anyone", "not affordable", "nobody is good enough". Dude makes easily $20k a month from Patreon, Subscribestar and other donations combined and then has the audacity to tell his supporters that he can't afford help? Not even a writer? Editor? But he can afford his non-existent animator to slow development down further...what a coincidence. Almost like he's doing the animations himself...oopsie.
2. You are right. That said, I'm laughing my ass of. It is L&P we are talking about. The guy would NEVER consider stopping payments. Not even during periods where he had technical issues or was unable to work for several months. Never. Because he doesn't give no fucks about any of his supporters. All he cares about is their money.
Sorry, wall of text achieved. Rant over. Have a nice day.