All very fair points, I just don't think we have the capability to tackle a more fleshed out and livable world at the moment with the bare team we have at the moment, and the size of our backers where they currently stand. All of our assets related to portrait models and backgrounds are done by hand, all by one person.
Our animator is only hired on for sketches of fluid animation, not the coloring, not the shading, not the actual finalized line work. All of that stuff belongs to GZone in terms of priority and duties. With characters not being allowed to exist within the town, we're kind of at a crossroads, because usually, if you add a feature or an asset, you want to utilize that functionality from the beginning. The problem comes from actually have to go about and putting missing models (Lancer, Paulina, Tucker, Jazz, Valerie, Star) in environments where they are consistently allowed to be accessed and interactable (Unlike already existing models like Sam, Maddie, and Jack). Once you put those things in, it takes time and effort to put those things in, retroactively.
That's the reason we have the Episode Jumps exist, and why old saves do not work. As soon as we put in additional logic and assets that didn't exist at the time the player played at the end of the previous update, the renpy engine doesn't know how to get to a thing it doesn't know exists. So restarting just make things much easier for the game, and for the player as users.
As to the Episode Jumps, they serve to help the player progress to any stage of the game they were at before they finished the entirety of an episode. Not everyone who plays our game is a new player, but sometimes there are new people who view our game. We want them to have the freedom to tackle the game at any stage, pretty much.
The best way I could describe our game development, especially since major changes have happened with the use of new optimization features (the reason why even big games like Summertime Saga are choosing to redo their models), is that we could start a NEW, completely different game, with better ideas, faster, and done right from the beginning. Which is our plan for something after we finish Amity Park. But, considering we know how to make a game better than when we did at the start of this project, we can only try to pick the pace of the game to where we want it to be, but it's not the easiest thing to rebuild the foundation of a building post the groundwork already being laid. Long story short, I appreciate the feedback, I hope I alleviated some of your worry about the game. Thanks again.
