It's unfortunate he got hung up on switching out the sandbox. I think that consumed a lot of his effort. Personally I was fine with it and enjoy the freedom they provide. Oh well. His Patreon page still shows he has 15 patrons. It appears at least 2 of his supporters are of the $5 range (or 1 at $10). It'd be interesting to find out if he even logs on, or if any of his active patrons have communications with him...
Yeah, I don't know about that. I mean, the story so far was already pretty streamlined... the sandbox was not only utterly useless, it made the programming needlessly more complex (it's way easier to just write a story with multiple paths for RenPy, than to create a Sandbox-Map with events).
You needed Fitness, so you went to the gym ONCE. No need to do that multiple times.
You needed to buy a suit, so you went to the store ONCE. Again, no need to do that multiple times.
Every sandbox-location was ever only used when needed for that particular part of the story. Deviating from that story didn't earn or reward you anything. Normaly you would say "well, maybe it will be needed in future updates?", to which I can only say: If that were the case, the dev would have stuck with the sandbox-mode.
As much as it hurt me to say this (I REALLY think this guy was super talented), it's just yet another example of a hobby dev, who started developing a game without having thought about the process or end goal. No road map detailing which version should reach a milestone, not even a clear image of what the game is supposed to be in the end. Did he even have a complete storyboard? Think of all the games that get abandoned half way through, because the devs run out of ideas or wrote themselves into a corner. Or all the games on here that put out updates that break your savegames (looking at you DeLuca Family...every update...). Why does this happen? Because they decided to put stuff in that requires variables, they didn't think about before. THAT'S the real issue with so many games on here.
