Hope you guys are enjoying the game! To address some of the concerns about development speed:
The game is being developed by 4 employees, 1 full time, 3 part time. 4 employees at about $50k a year split between them.
We have 1 writer, 1 sound engineer, 1 artist, and our lead developer.
The lead developer does all of the coding and writing editing, as well as all of the backgrounds and finishing asset work (taking assets from sketches to fully rendered sprites including shading).
I do characters designs, sketches, asset edits, and a variety of other small roles.
We stream almost all of our work on the game, and streams typically range between 8 and 16 hours a day. While I understand concerns about speed, we produce 1 chapter every 2-3 months. Each chapter we've released has had about 20k written words and 250 images (including around 20 CG's).
Unlike most VN's we fully render all of our sprites and bg's, which increases the time it takes to make each asset by quite a bit. We could cut production time a lot if we stuck to simple shading or flat colored sprites and backgrounds - or used 3d assets to simplify development. When we started the project we asked people what they'd prefer, and people overwhelmingly preferred a higher quality art style and game, even if it took longer.
Though the reason we're successful is most likely because we are developing a VN for a niche audience that doesn't get a lot of content. We felt people would support an ambitious project in our niche if they were offered a chance to, and they did.
We built a reputation for making quality stuff in our community before we started the project, so we didn't have to prove to people that we would be able to do it.
I understand if you think it's a scam, I've been in your situation looking at long development schedules for stuff like this. Our supporters are supporting us for a reason, we stream all of our work, and we're always working.
All that said, if you've got any questions on the game, feel free to ask.
