From what I can tell after following animopron's development for years.
Porn is being made.
The porn is being delivered.
The porn is amazing and outstanding, no doubt.
Animopron is an idiot, no idea about marketing the product.
Little to no idea about creating and uilizing unreal engine.
I love the idea of seeing the work of his in a game and be able to interact with these animations that I have watched hundreds of times, but the development is a slow drag, the slowest I have ever seen. EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
But this is how he operates, giving gifs and pics to provide hype before releasing the stuff half a year later. Who the fuck does that?
I get that there is a feckload of work being put into this and finding proper assets of the UE market can be hard. But his fanbase is huge, like really huge. Why not pay some fucking artists who actually know there shit? Like, the most crucial stuff, the animations and models is what he already has made! He pretty much has it all and just needs to deliver the rest which is by far less than that.
Working with those blueprints in UE is easy as hell and a professional can utilize the coding and make something out of it, but Animopron is known for his animations. Just the animations he prove were good, in fact, they are a milestone in 3D porn imo.
But seeing these clunky ass assets and hud displays....again...the ones we've seen in so many other games is really disappointing.
But the drag until the next teaser is being released is just annoying, until then most of us will have forgotten about it and moved on. That is not how you advertise and this is not how you treat your fans.
Game development is very difficult. Especially for complete noobs at developing. You are expecting a level of developer capability, like John Carmack. Animopron isn't that; he might be eventually, but he isn't now.
"Giving gifs and pics to provide hype before releasing the stuff half a year later" AAA game developers. How many pics and videos was released of Cyberpunk 2077 before it finally was purchaseable and playable on Steam?
Getting assets into UE is a royal pain in the rectal cavity. I tried developing a simple RTS in UE4 back in 2015, and the number of times the asset would get butt-fugged to oblivion was insane. Sometimes it wouldn't load. Sometimes parts of the mesh was missing. Sometimes the texture map had alignment issues. Its not a simple task to get assets into UE4, unless you use their official pipeline with 3DS Max. But, most prefer to use the Blender pipeline, like Animopron.
Even finding assets on the UE4/5 market still often requires a lot of work to use them nicely. Sometimes you want physics, and they don't have physics applied to the mesh, so you have to do it manually. Its not a simple plug and play type of thing here... otherwise asset flips in general would be super easy to do with a lot of mechanical complexity / diversity.
Working with Blueprints is anything but easy. If you don't know the name of the module that you need for your blueprint script, you can easily get stuck. And the documentation is far from easy to use to find the module you need. Debugging blueprint scripts also isn't an easy task and if you mess around with the wrong metadata, the entire program can crash and corrupt your project file (that happened to me, and killed my RTS project).
Most professionals also won't use Blueprints, but prefer to code in C++. The Blueprint scripting is there for noobs at coding to get some level of programming completed with a minimal understanding of coding principles and syntax. But any serious developers will use C++ instead as its more powerful, less resource intensive, and much more performant.
Clunky assets and bad HUDs are representative of artists or modelers who aren't UI/UX designers or programmers. Because actual ones won't use Blueprint scripting to do the work. The only time professionals do use Blueprint scripting is for the modding toolkit, that only allows you to create mods with blueprint scripting (ie Ark Survival or Conan Exiles does it this way).
The usual way to advertise is to not have a Patreon. You develop quietly behind the scenes, and release an Alpha at a specific point. Most patreons dis-incentivizes people to actually complete a product, as that is when the money stops.