Did i say he's the greatest, or that there aren't more experienced people out there? I didn't say anything about these things so why are you randomly throwing in these assumptions? If he would've started this project with someone else then sure, i'd agree, but bringing someone else in halfway through isn't that great. Not when it comes to creative work and not if you don't like working with others. He has people for proofreading and playtesting from what i know and that's enough.
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- Mar 19, 2020
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I agree he needs to find a way to better use his resources, however I can understand why he wouldn’t want to start a studio or something similar. Once you go from being the self Employed to being the boss of even 2 or 3 people life is suddenly much more complicated. You’d have to be able reply on the other employees to relieve more stress than being the ‘boss’ creates.I would say greed, he's now at a point that he earns so much that he could open a game studio and hire ppl and still have a shit load of money... the lame excuse answer that he gave on his Q&A is just that a lame excuse, doing this form passion yeah passion with steam release too cuz patreon wasn't enoughyou just have to read post #2 on this thread to realise what kind of a dude he is, don't get me wrong his games are one of the best if not the best but he as a person, yeah i have my doubts...
My ideas where he could use the money while maintaing creative control;
Voice acting (I think for these games to go to the next level this will be necessary)
Hire an animator. Not for the game, but commission short films using the character models.could be animation of existing in game events or new stuff. Could be cool to get say a 5 minute animation of the sex scenes or what have you.
Commission a comic book artist. DPC could still write the stories but an artist could draw them. Either to flesh out the world or as an adaptation.
Hire someone to make more ‘gallery’ content. He can still control it but it’s less important than the general content
These are some great ideas, but it's optional content, so i don't see him being in a hurry to do any of this. I do recall him mentioning voice acting for the complete game if i'm not mistaken and also something about drawings.
- May 23, 2020
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Was going to say something similar. For example, let's say he got 3 other people to help out with renders or something. He get's what he needs to do for the update done and maybe or two of the others do as well, everything's ready to go and then something happens to the third person and they can't finish for whatever reason. Well now the update is delayed for however long it takes for that person's problem to be resolved before they can finish and release it, that's a reliance that some people just don't want to deal with and I can understand that.
I took a glance at the patreon and he doesn't have a dollar goal tracker to show his total monthly pledges. With 7500 patrons he's probably doing pretty well, but generally the average $ per patron for Patreon creators is a lot lower than you'd think: You have some superdonors, but a huge porportion of your pledges are for the minimum. I doubt he's averaging even $5 per patron; that would mean he's taking about 40k/month, which is obviously enough to hire people but is far from 'enough money to start a game studio' or whatever people were saying above. Hiring employees is expensive, as if you want stable staff you have a lot more expenses than just salary rates (payroll taxes, benefits costs, etc): actual salary is usually only around 60% of what the employer spends per employee, give or take a bit (benefits are more expensive for small businesses than for major corps, as they lack purchasing power leverage. Also, in tech industries you generally wouldn't expect real employees to do all their work on their personal computers, which may not have the capability to do what you want, or the software - you'd want to be using standard technology, same IDE, etc for your work. If you don't do that stuff, you have massive turnover and you never really recoup your cost per employee, as employees don't generally generate value for the employer until they've been working for a bit due to the overhead costs of hiring and training.
I would guess that DPC has the ability to pay for a few full time employees, and its possible testers, script proofreaders or writing assistants, etc are more valuable to his work than additional programmers. It's also possible it'd just be a very good idea for him to bring in a secondary programmer with the understanding that they wouldn't be working on the things he's most concerned about - just having someone who cleans up bugs, streamlines code, fills in dialogue from the scripts, etc would probably be pretty valuable. It's also possible he already has all of those things in place, and they're not what cause production bottleneck in the first place.
Adding additional help is much, much more complex than people tend to portray it as, and the way people talk about it usually tells you if they have any experience in a hiring/firing supervisory role in any business.
Another consideration are non-employee business costs, from hardware upgrades to licensing. When you're in full for-profit, professional, putting your game on Steam mode, you start to incur software licensing costs for the products you use to create your game, especially if you want to add employees (because you don't hire people and expect them to buy all their own software, and you really need everyone to work on the same platforms). In particular, this game licenses music. That costs money! I'm not sure I really believe that is a good use of resources, but, then again, I play most of these kinds of games with the volume off anyway, so ... I'm the wrong person to ask about that. But it's definitely a cost, and it might be more than you think because I wouldn't be surprised if some artists are surcharging higher for an XXX product than they would a more mainstream one - that's pretty common (and another reason why it seems like licensing so much music is unnecessary, but I guess for people who play with music having appropriate music in all the party scenes and things is probably a good thing)
- Aug 8, 2020
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If I recall correctly, DPC had a poll about VA, and most of the people deemed it 'not so relevant' or unimportant. I agree tbh, of course you don't have the voice for a particular character, but, at least for me, it doesn't take anything away from the experience. Certain facial expressions (smirks, grins, etc.) set a good tone for the characters in generalThese are some great ideas, but it's optional content, so i don't see him being in a hurry to do any of this. I do recall him mentioning voice acting for the complete game if i'm not mistaken and also something about drawings.
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A thing that's also a consideration about farming secondary stuff like the renders off to a subordinate is that, for creators who are Patreon-dependent, a lot of their income comes from a fairly small selection of their Patrons, and what those people are actually paying for is direct interaction with the creator and the belief that their opinions and ideas and suggestions are getting heard. That's also what all of the render/preview/poll stuff he does is about - keeping those people engaged, because there's a good chance that the, like, top 30-40 patrons of his 7400+ supply like 20-30% of his total income.
There is a Patreon creator that I have been a longtime supporter of who takes pledges from $1 up to $100. For 3 years, I was a $30/month Patron, and at Christmastime I would bump it up to $100/month for 2 months (the creator would lose a lot of patrons over the winter), so i was giving $500/year. Last time I checked I am in the top 10 all time in total contributors to that creator, and they have more patrons than DPC does. And they don't make adult content, where whales who are into your material can REALLY spend money. I no longer give at that level because my personal financial situation has changed, but that creator still gives me all the benefits as if I did, and knows me by name via private message.
That kind of relationship building can't be farmed out to subordinates and it is very important to maintaining the Patreon income. And if you start hiring people, it's extremely important to keep that income stable. A product that is funded by what amounts to charitable giving can't take out bank loans or the like in order to cover shortages or gaps. I would be interested in seeing a chart of DPC's average $ per patron and patron count over the year. I bet that the patron count spikes hard when it appears a new release is coming and that once they have the content a lot of people drop or remove their pledge until the next release looks imminent. I may do that myself - I like his game, but I can't afford to give him $25/month right now, but I would totally give him $25 this month to get the update immediately, then kill my pledge in September. Patreon income is not very reliable.
- Dec 7, 2017
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Dude i sayed that you MAKE HIM LOOK like he's the greatest from your post, read your post again, you can bring ppl around at any time doesn't matter if it's the start, middle or finish of a project, you can have meetings where you can tell your ppl your vision and what you want from them, it's not like ppl don't work in teams and he is the first who need to try it... for me his reasons are pretty obvious, let's not forget that DPC was an active member around here with his first game but once he hit the jackpot he retired in his ivory tower and now he hates our pirates guts...
You know that there are game developers around here who do that with way less income...
There's a big difference between paying folks as contractors or just one-off, under the table stuff and having actual full time employees.
For my part, I really wonder how much he spends on the music licenses and whether that is a wise expenditure of money.
FWIW I think it's apparent that DPC is a gifted creator in certain regards, as he seems to be able to create characters and stories that have an emotional impact on most users, which is something that is pretty rare in the VN space. That doesn't necessarily mean he's gifted at any number of other things, though. In particular, being a gifted creator/storyteller/artist and being a gifted manager of a business have pretty much zero overlapping skills.
Saying that some people don't want to work or take responsibility for others and enjoy having a solo project makes him look like he's the greatest? We clearly have a very different understanding of what makes someone stand out so i'm going to end this discussion here.
- Dec 13, 2018
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I always find it interesting when people start suggesting that a dev start "working with a team" because they seem to think it's super easy to do this, but it isn't.
For starters, some devs like DPC are doing perfectly fine on their own. This game gets regular updates roughly every 4 months and the level of content is far beyond almost every other game that releases updates in the same timeframe, so it's not like he's struggling to get substantial updates out in a timely manner like some other devs I can think of.
Secondly, working with others means not only paying them out of your own pocket, but mainly it's about finding others who are on the same wavelength as you with regards to understanding not only your vision for the game, but how to produce content that is at the same level as the dev and at a similar pace. That's probably the hardest part of collaboration in this business because unlike in other lines of work, you can't really afford to be spending time essentially getting someone trained up to the proper level.
Lastly, even if you could find someone, there's no guarantee you'll find them living in the same area as you which means you might end up with someone in another country which makes communicating back and forth that much slower than if they were there with you in person. So really, all this would be a hassle to DPC right now and they don't have any reason to be working with others since the solo act is working fine for them right now.
The main reason why I think people want devs to work in teams is because if anything sudden were to happen to the dev, it might mean the game's future is put in jeopardy, but if they had a team then at least there would be others who could carry on. So it's less about wanting them to work with others to increase production times, and more about the worry of the game not being completed if something happened to the dev.
I honestly dont get why people feel they need these noices anyway because if seeing these hot scenes isn't enough to get you off, then I don't think a few moans and groans are really going to help much.
For starters, some devs like DPC are doing perfectly fine on their own. This game gets regular updates roughly every 4 months and the level of content is far beyond almost every other game that releases updates in the same timeframe, so it's not like he's struggling to get substantial updates out in a timely manner like some other devs I can think of.
Secondly, working with others means not only paying them out of your own pocket, but mainly it's about finding others who are on the same wavelength as you with regards to understanding not only your vision for the game, but how to produce content that is at the same level as the dev and at a similar pace. That's probably the hardest part of collaboration in this business because unlike in other lines of work, you can't really afford to be spending time essentially getting someone trained up to the proper level.
Lastly, even if you could find someone, there's no guarantee you'll find them living in the same area as you which means you might end up with someone in another country which makes communicating back and forth that much slower than if they were there with you in person. So really, all this would be a hassle to DPC right now and they don't have any reason to be working with others since the solo act is working fine for them right now.
The main reason why I think people want devs to work in teams is because if anything sudden were to happen to the dev, it might mean the game's future is put in jeopardy, but if they had a team then at least there would be others who could carry on. So it's less about wanting them to work with others to increase production times, and more about the worry of the game not being completed if something happened to the dev.
Which is good because voice acting in these kinds of things is overall pretty crummy because it's basically just a bunch of canned moans, groans, and fake orgasm noises that generally don't sync properly with the animated scenes they get attached to and generally sounds terrible.
I honestly dont get why people feel they need these noices anyway because if seeing these hot scenes isn't enough to get you off, then I don't think a few moans and groans are really going to help much.
- Sep 7, 2018
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I agree with you completely I think DPC is better on his own just look at Where the Heart is the dev lost contact with his renderer and the updates were delayed because of that as well as other things.
The Sage route is 'easier' because you can get a bunch of free relationship points with her in the first 2 encounters only if you have DIK status. As you mentioned, it doesn't make it impossible.
Sage's RP currently have no role in the game, it is true, though Maya's, Josy's, Isabella's and Jill's all do, so it seems a little odd to assume that Sage's will never be relevant.
- Dec 13, 2018
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WillTyler also lost contact with his coder for A Family Venture and that game took a big hit because of it.
So while collaboration may sound like a good idea, it ideally needs to be with people who are in the same area as you and to perhaps even rent/hire an office that you can all work out of like Inceton, because distance collaboration, especially with someone you rely heavily on, is much more risky than just making the game yourself. But finding people in your area with the necessary level of skill and hardware capabilities is also quite a difficult thing, so it's understandable that DPC doesn't want to waste time on this.
Yeah, that's what happens (or can happen) when you aren't actually hiring people on as their real job. With that said, there are some options Holy Bacchus doesn't mention, like bringing on a subsidiary programmer who works on stuff where it does't matter if they agree with the overall vision, like bugfixes, implementing the script into the scenes, and other such stuff. Bringing in someone to work with you does not mean making that person your peer or giving them any sort of creative control whatsoever. In fact, in most programming work, the typical developer has very little say in what the priorities are or how the features need to work - that information usually comes from management or from outside the development group (eg the business unit that will use the product and describes what they need it to do), and development leadership (lead dev, product owner, etc) make the decisions about how that will be implemented in a technical sense. Your typical developer is given a ticket of what something needs to do and how it needs to do it and told to get it done. But in order to have that kind of relationship with another programmer, you have to hire them as an employee and give them a stable salary and benefits - it doesn't work with a volunteer. And that is much more expensive and complicated.
But, for all we know, DPC already has someone or someones doing that sort of work for him, and it isn't what causes production bottlenecks.
Heck, we don't even know that DPC is a single person. It could easily be a nom de plume for a partnership or team that speak under a single name in the interest of building a profile.
- Sep 20, 2018
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Indeed. Doing X and running a company that does X are very different things and it is a mistake to conflate the two.
I'd like faster updates as much as the next guy, but hiring employees would be a such massive change for DPC that I think it would actually slow down updates in the short term. If he picked the right employees things could start to pick up after the teething period. But if he picked the wrong employees, the game might never recover. Given that, AFAIK, DPC has no experience as a hiring manager, that's just not worth the risk IMHO.
As for music licenses, I can't say for certain without knowing just how much he spends but my gut says it's worth it. The game's soundtrack is one of its best assets. It really helps set the tone of the game and is often just fun to listen to. Given that a lost of the music is freely available, I suspect the amount he spends on the rest is justified.
If DPC wanted to do that, what he should actually do is hire someone not as a programmer but as a manager to handle that entire process, someone who shares and/or accepts his overall vision for the product and the roles of the secondary programmers, and then let that person handle it. Managing people is pretty much a full time job, and most modern development teams use fairly unique strategies and divisions of responsibility to allow programmers who are technical leads to also continue to generate work product, because they would otherwise never have time.
When I was finishing my programming curriculum, I was the top student in my class, and so my classmates chose me as the technical lead for our final project, which was a 2 week group app development from scratch. I wrote literally like 20 lines of code for the first week of the project, because I spent all my time assisting the members of my team with their problems. 80% of my work output came in the last 36 hours, where I knew what difficult tasks remained in the project and I could assign the simpler/secondary tasks to everyone else and focus on taking care of the biggest remaining challenges myself. I still wrote over half the code in the final application.
I have not occupied a tech lead position in the workplace yet, but my conversations with people who do suggest that isn't an uncommon experience when standing up a new team and people aren't used to working together yet. I was fortunate, because I am a career change person - I had another career before I switched to programming - and in that career I was a hiring manager for 8 years. So I had the experience in communication and feedback and task delegation to handle the requests I got from my classmates. Most programmers lack that kind of experience, and management roles in the programming world are often the hardest jobs to fill, because it's very difficult for them to find people who are both capable coders and have management experience. Consequently, they end up with a lot of people overqualified on one side and underqualified on the other.
You say RP comes only into play during the picnic scene. I don't use the walkthrough nor have i seen that scene. Care to explain it a bit more? Do you need a certain amount of RP for an option?
There are some other situations where RP comes into play and changes scenes, including the Ep 5 sex scene with Josy (in the dorm room), where the scene is extended with new options if you have more than 10 RP, and at the end of Ep 3 you gain additional interactions during the near-sex scene with Maya if you have at least 14 RP with her.
And then, of course, there's the fairly complicated Isabella favor points system, which is not the same as Isabella's RP but interacts with it both ways: A lot of the actions that help you get Isabella's approval to date Jill also increase Isabella's RP, most of the actions that hurt her approval also reduce her RP, and you get additional credit with her if your RP with her are positive (or lose credit if they are negative), and then gaining or losing that approval ALSO gives or costs you more RP with Isabella. That entire system is needlessly complex, but winning her approval is largely synonymous with improving her RP score.
I'd agree the system's a bit under-used overall (it seems a little inconsistent where the system goes back and forth between using a girl's specific RP and using your DIK/CHICK status to unlock interaction), but it's not irrelevant, and seems to be used increasingly frequently later in the game (which makes sense, as something that's been accumulating over the whole game, whereas DIK/CHICK is something you can swing pretty rapidly from side to side if you try to).
The RP thresholds overall also have been pretty easy to meet: having 11+ RP with Josy or 21+ RP with Maya in Episode 5 is not very hard to do. Having 14 with Maya at the end of Ep 3 is somewhat easier to miss (the option was locked out for me on my first playthrough), which makes sense given the nature of the situation.
Sage's RP don't yet play a role in the story, but I'd be very surprised if they weren't all relevant in the long run.
During the picnic scene where you lay with the girls, you have interaction options with them and one of them is caress. If you choose to caress Maya's cheek and have more than 20 RP with her, she'll kiss the MC instead of just staring into his eyes. If you have at least 11 RP with Josy and caress her thigh, MC will play with her panties as well.
Having adequate RP also unlocks some options in other sex scenes with each girl (Josy in Ep 5, Maya at the end of Ep 3). In the Maya scene, there are different scenes/options based on your DIK/CHICK score, or if you have the requisite RP with Maya you simply get both.