Well, i said it before in a different post way in the past (a year ago or so, cause its a upcoming topic every week i will write something again).
I have coded some myself and was involved in creating software...
Let me tell you. "Outsourcing" is not everytime something that speed things up. It often doesnt. Especially in gamedevelopment.
DPC has a special flow how he works. Outsourcing something would disturb it very much. He has a plan for each episode, but what he does from week to week is very different and depends on what he has done and needs in the next step. If he would outsource things, he has to work on the same things again and again and wait for the others to get things done, he wouldnt survive this one month. He needs to mix everything up once in a while. Thats the main reason why he creates everything himself and does so many different things, even creating music. If he wouldnt do it like he does, we wouldnt even seen episode 6 at this point and the game would be abandoned.
You can look up other games around here, created by whole teams.... there is not a single DEV team that creates content faster than DPC, not one. Some teams are kinda big, 5 people and more and dont come even close to the numbers of DPC.
Creating something like this renpy style games in a team has a lot of hiccups coming with it. You need to coordinate everything, and at the end you have to piece everything together and than the error searching begins, which sometimes takes more time than the development itself. Which is the reason why so many games are incomplete and buggy. Being a Dik has very few bugs when a episode is released, besides the one that are mod related...
And by the way, what do you think he could "outsource"?
You said it yourself... things that arent art related or coding you think he can outsource... well... what could that be? I cant think of anything. Every bit of art has to go through the hands of DPC anyways... if anybody creates it for him, he would check every bit himself anyways and it would take the same amount of time if he would do it himself to begin with, be it music, animations or whatever. He has to code and write everything himself too, cause during the development sometimes he has new ideas and add them or changes things... to coordinate that with a other person on the fly is a nightmare and even more timeconsuming, it doesnt work.
Bottom line... the ONLY thing he could hand out to other people to speed things up would be the render process his PC slaves are doing. Which woudl cost more money than to do it himself and besides the render and animation queue is his "timekeeper". He creates everything aorund this queue... the renderqueue dictates the development pace now. He could speed this queue up, easily... if he would add more hardware or outsource the render process. But what does that mean for him? That he needs to work faster... aaaaaand... that leads to burnout.
I get that you want to have the episodes out faster, but its easier said than done. Its not that simple to say "well get some burden off your shoulders and everything will be faster" its just not true. Its like saying "work faster dude".
He needs to stay healthy too, and still love creating the game. Many DEVs burn out or get tired creating their games cause they are doing to much of the same things over and over again.
You can blame DPC for many things (to make it short, he is an asshole, nobody would disagree around here), but the way he develops the game seems to be the right way, cause he does it faster than all the other on F95, in top quality too and already a long time without throwing the rifle in the field.
The update interval will most likely increase furthermore. But so does the content amount. We already broke the record of episode 10 by far. He created more stuff for episode 11 in a shorter time period compared to episode 10. Its likely that we will get a episode with about 7500 (i think we will get close to the 8000) still renders and about 400 animations. Which is about 20% bigger than episode 10, without slowing the overall development process down, its just "more" of everything.
I think at some point we will reach the peak of "branching"... it feels like we are close to that already. Episode 10 opened up some new branching for sidegirls, but closed some "side-plots" too and more or less every girl has its branch now, and those who doesnt will not get any i think, not every girl will be a Love interest. With end of season 3 it is most likely that the branching will decrease cause more and more plots will close... if DPC stays true to his word, its only 6 episodes left from now on (maybe one interlude coming again, and epilogue?) So its natural that at some point the branching stops increasing. But it will not speed things up, cause he has to deal with most of the existing branches til the end anyways.
Speeding things up with simply "outsourcing" some things form the development is kinda whishful thinking. Especially if you dont work from the start like that. It takes a lot of effort and time to get a "team" running so things will speed up, it doesnt even make any sense anymore at this point.
