AGLover This is the problem with dev especially with game dev. Everyone thinks ok I can do 3D + animation the rest is easy part well it is not. If You have skilled dev. then yes it can be done, in parts, and will progress smoothly, but I didn't seen senior devs who actually could develop game (with spec that AP presented) under 1 year. There is of course other problem i.e. skills of animator / 3D artists and dev. Are those matched or not? This will cause delays either on dev or graphics side of things.
But I think that the there are 2 main problems here:
1. supporters being hyped and obviously most don't have dev experience so they can't judge if what, in this case AP, tells is true or not
2. over estimation with deadline from AP side and not conveying good enough what current status is. I did seen those generic post like "mocap is ready" etc. but those are statements out of the whole project scope context. What did actually mean ? Does mocap for portion is done or for whole project? Is mocap just small part or actually AP did performed all those animations that we seen in game and that means that all animations are mocaped and done ?
Personally I was mostly on dev side of things and we usually did not estimations but "guesstimations". By this I mean we did just guessed how long it will take individual dev to make a thing and then mostly rushed (well not always, like 20% of the time, but it happened) and fixed anything afterwards, so client was happy and seen progress. The main problem is obviously if You fuk up at core level and that causes re-write for large portion of the code and if that happened we did either conveyed this to the client or just created some dummy tasks that were not completely understood by the client or overestimated other tasks and made corrections under that task.
Communication - this is key. If You as creator can keep up with deadlines then You don't need to communicate much just set expected deadline and / or timeline / release window and if You can keep it up then there is basically no need to communicate to people anything. Otherwise You will most likely to communicate what happens behind the scene to keep people informed and happy. Maybe also change release strategy i.e. instead of one release for the entire project divide it into chunks - and that's what most do, unfortunately not AP and seeing that "demo" aka POC now I understand why they did it that way. As the supporter look for those don't support ad-hoc just keep Your time bookmark creator and get back after 1 month and see what was shared to the public and then decide.
On personal note other example is Calyos NSG S0 - this is passively cooled case for up to 500W IIRC. It was supposed to release 2018-2019 and it failed... hard. Lucky for me I didn't backed it up.
All of above teached me to:
1. research entities behind whatever You want to financially support
2. don't buy to hype - be pessimist
3. ask questions and see if those are replied to or if there is any kind of communication
4. think what You want to get in return
5. is all of this worth it for You
At the end of the day those are Your money and more or less You will roll the die if, or not, support.
As stated before I personally also like the concept of the game and what I seen on videos and I hope AP will succeed with their attempt but I don't buy to the hype and being here realistic (IMHO 1 dev is not enoght to deliver it withing next year, assuming that the demo contains most of the work - and again I hope it is old build).
