it part of the problem of being a solo dev while the "old days" of two eps a year was great for fans it seems it wasn't good for DPC or at least that what he says stress wise. If DPC could use anything it someone that keep him focus and someone that can do the stuff he don't want to so he has more time for what he interested in but DPC to much of a it got to be my vision type to do that
Well, yeah.
He changed his workshedule a lot after episode 8 and "improved" it after episode 9 again.
He was "burned" out after episode 8, and told us so via discord and patreon too. Another reason for the interlude, just as a stress reliever too.
With episode 7 and 8 he realised that he loved creating animations and wanted to do way more of them and better ones too, the count of animations nearly doubled from one episode to the other that time. But they are time consuming to render. I think he kinda underestimated that a little for episode 9, he had to wait nearly 2 months in the end only for the animation queue to finish and was done with everything else.
With episode 10 he decided that the animation queue will be the "time-keeper" for the whole workshedule.
He had to wait for the animations anyway, so why not creating the whole other stuff around it? instead of working 10-12 hours a day and wait in the end for the animations anyways, he can create the stuff in 6-8 hours, can have a normal day-work-shedule and still get things done like he wants to cause the animation queue sets up the pace anyways.
The only thing to increase the development time would be to "outsource" the rendering process of his animations to somebody who has more PC-slave-power than DPC himself. But that would mean DPC needs to work way faster on the rest of the game to get things done, which will be unhealthy like it was before episode 8 for him, not a good tradeoff.
Giving away other things would not increase the development speed at all, in fact, more like slow down... he has to overwatch everything, and go over things again and again. Especially coding-wise this is a desaster and is not practical at all.
But his workshedule wasnt healthy anyways. He had to change it to not burn out. Episode 8 was a wakeup call for him.
Lets face it, 12 months for about 6000 renders and maybe 350-400 animations, as a sole-DEV. Is still way more than any other game around here can deliver, by far (not to mention all the branching stuff and keeping track of it without screwing the game up). Most of the more ambitious projects are working in a team and cant keep up, not even close.
digi.B is the only one who can kinda keep up, but he isnt working alone on his project and doesnt even do 1/3 of the animations DPC is creating.
So everybody should keep that in mind too.
And you mentioned DPC could give away some work he doesnt want to do himself. Well, we dont know what exactly that would be? He loves creating minigames from time to time, he loves creating animations a lot, he loves to create the art and still renders most of the time. Writing too. Coding would be something i would say he doesnt "enjoy" that much, but it is out of the question to give that in other hands.
The best way to get things done faster woudl be.... to restrain himself. But well, he simply cant cause he is kinda sick in the head like that. With each and every episode he realised he wanted to do MORE than what he was doing. More of just everything, from sound, to music, to animations and just everything else. He wasnt satisfied with season 1 one bit. 2 episodes a year is nice and all, but not to DPC when he is not pleased with the result.
Overall we have to deal with the fact that the game will likely go on another 5 years until the finish line. IF that means another 25.000 renders with about 1500-2000 animations until than, so be it. At least iam pretty sure like DPCs works now, he will not lose interest to finish the game.
I dont like it that we are on a 12 months DEV shedule now. And the result of episode 9 was the reason i stopped supporting him. Now i just buy the episode when its released. And if that is not possible anymore, well... this site has its purpose right?
But overall, how DPC is doing things now is the right way i think. Just looking back to some DEV reports during the episode 8 DEV cycle and reading them now every week is such a huge difference. You can read between the lines how "healthy" and overall in a good mood DPC is now, and during episode 8 i got the feeling he just wants to dig a hole and vansih from earth and be done with it. So he made the right choices, obviously for himself and the game in the long run. Overall things have slowed down, yeah... but not that much. with the Hardware upgrades and if he would restrain himself a little more, he could easily push out the episodes in 7-8 months. But yeah... we would not see a season 4 for sure like that, the epsiode 8 DEV cycle showed that.
And besides... this forum kinda lives from the trolls who come every week and drop their "oh episode 11 in december 2026, fucking milker" line. Where would we be without them.
