This is a mess.
On one hand, a guy that should have been more forthcoming about his situation with his partner in development, give him a more clear answer, and on the other hand, a guy bullying a hospitalized guy into working again on his "Precious" project and dismissing his situation just because he's no getting what he wants.
Just forget about this project guys, you two clearly don't mix well, one likes to work at his own pace and on his terms, the other wants to have control of every single word in the game.
This won't end well, this will last for 2 or 3 updates before the situation becomes unbearable for both of you.
Just let it die and move on.
Honestly, had I known Sin was in the hospital with the drugs, surgery, ect... I'd have totally postponed all of this a couple of weeks or even a month or whatever until he is back home back on his feet and feeling better. The thing is he never dropped me a message saying. "I'm gonna be gone for a week or two because I need to get some surgery." He chose to keep me out of the loop, and not for the first time. A simple 5-second message would have avoided the drama.
I was under the belief that he was simply ignoring/avoiding my messages, which is not an unfair assumption given the situation, and the way he has acted towards me and towards DG development previously. It's reasonable for me to think that was the case.
It's not unreasonable for me to be at my wit's end with Sin right now. It's not about the past few days, but more so the past several months.
Sadly, over time I have learned that I can not trust Sin the way I would like to. I would like to trust Sin. I really would, and that would be fantastic if I could.
Here is a complete timeline of my mistrust in Sin over time, and how mistrust was built up both ways from my perspective:
I saw a "writer wanted" post by Sin in the forums, and communications began. He had a demo of a game already in tyrano builder... but it was a very early demo, and we decided to pretty much just scrap that, but we did manage to salvage our beloved Kelly character from it to have a role in a new game with a new personality. Things were great at first.
Early in development Sin mentioned to me that he was using a hired 3rd party to do much of his pose work for him. He never shared the identity of this person with me, nor got me in communications with them at all in spite of me asking to know their identity. All I knew is that there is this person he was hiring & thus the cost of production would be going up. Sin was paying the bill for this, as he has done so consistently so I was okay with it. It's his money, and he can spend it how he wants. However, I did make a forum post in the dev-only forums asking if his behavior sounded sketchy at all and a "What would you do?" Other devs pretty much unanimously said this is very suspicious behavior, and I wouldn't work with that person they sound like a scammer. Sin & I had a little fight over this... but in spite of many devs saying "Bad idea" I went ahead anyway because I wanted to give Sin the benefit of the doubt, and I liked the renders he had made so far. I still feel that unnamed person deserves a credit if they do as much work as Sin says they do if they want a credit.
So work continued for a long time pretty much in the dark to the public. At some points, Sin took a bit more initiative than I wanted him to on the rendering. Entire scenes were generated that were never ordered for the story. Sin was not happy that some of the scenes had to go. For example, there was a bondage rape scene in a prison. It wouldn't have flown on Patreon rules, so it had to go because we needed to not get banned from there. There was another scene that confused me with some random black guy that was supposed to be some sort of hacker but also doing sleeper creeper stuff. It's not that they were bad renders Sin usually makes good renders, and he did those pretty good too, but the story just would just not flow with that as a part of it.
Some stuff is already rendered and "in the hole" so to say. A drive with Rose, Jessica, and Kelly in the forest is saved and ready to go when we need it. The thing is we don't need it yet. Rose has to go to school on day 2 first before we can consider that an option for a scene to use.
So Sin was making too many renders that either we could "Never use" or "Not use very soon." These "Wasted Renders" became a bit of a source of friction and conflict between myself and Sin. Sin with the stance of "I HATE WASTING RENDERS!" fair enough and me with the stance "WE DO NOT NEED THOSE SPECIFIC RENDERS RIGHT NOW!" which is also fair enough... Both of us had a very solid argument, and we were both right.
So, we needed to find a solution to this conflict to move forward. It was agreed upon that Instead of Sin just making renders of his own choosing willy nilly randomly rendering unrelated things... that instead, he would solely and specifically make renders that I put an order form in for so that we could make it into a coherent story with an overarching plot, and character development and good pacing.
A render order form is basically like this: A text file. I name the characters in the scene. I name the time of day. I mention any props needed for the scene. I mention the location of the scene. Then I go render by render on how I want the scene to play out. I do this loosely allowing for sin to add "Bonus in between renders" to smooth it out and stretch it out. So I may make a list of 40 or 50 renders, and sometimes sin may even stretch that out to 80 or 100 adding additional content in between renders listed. Sin was doing a great job at that and really going above and beyond. Give him props for that.
This new method worked really great for us in terms of producing quality content in a timely way and was much more efficient than the old way of sin randomly rendering whatever especially for storytelling purposes. However, I feel that sin felt like he was a bit on a leash like a slave or I was the boss of him, and I think he wanted to render what he wanted to render.
Anyways Christmas rolls around, and we are both pushing as hard as we can for that first release and we have a great first release in terms of popularity, but a bit more mediocre when it comes to money. Lots of 5-star reviews, but not a lot of 5 dollar patrons.
We figure maybe it's because there is no sex scenes yet? So we expand day 1 into some fun dream sex stuff. We make a heterosexual sex scene (Natash + Bishop) also Sin wanted a demon so we got a demon... but some folks started to complain. "We want lesbians!" So I tell Sin that is what people want, and (we decide on a Rose + Saphire scene). So we had an initial release plus a couple of tiny releases.
At some point, some troll was talking shit to me in this forum, and Sin took the side of the troll over mine. It was at this point I started to seriously lose trust in Sin. Sin doesn't really like to do the forum stuff. I don't mind it and enjoy engaging with folks in here. I have like 10 times more posts than him.
One day Sin drops a support ticket in on f95 (without giving me a heads up) with a "Change me to OP of Damaged Goods thread." I liked having the OP so I could control what tags are put in, and modify the OP and proofread it to fit. This started a fight, so I message the mods here, and I'm like "Put it back..." They wouldn't do it without Sins permission because were trying to "avoid drama" when they started drama by doing that in the first place... You see Sin had everything in his "SinAppeal" name... The discord, patreon, buy me a coffee, instargam, twitter ect... It's all sin sin sin sin sin... All branded Sin... I had just the 1 that was me as OP. Besides I'm a bigger forum whore than him. We had a battle over that, and Sin admitted to the moderators that I deserve to have OP so he apologized and moved on from that. Around this time sin started his "Your the boss" stuff.
Anyways, I was looking at some games that had been abandoned, but also popular and I saw an old game I liked called "My Sweet Neighbors." That was a great game, and I think it had a fun opening. So I go to sin with this idea. I tell him, hey why don't we make a 2nd game with a male lead as a way to make more money? This time we can start it out to a similar way as MSN, and make our own story out of it. This one first person perspective with a male lead, and smaller cast. We will call it "My Sweet Temptation", and make our own version of that same starting point that game had. Sin totally gets on board with it, and has me make a render order form for it, and I mention it in the forums, and say how we are gonna be working on a 2nd game...
,Sin totally worked on my "My Sweet Tempation" outline and idea making some changes, but by himself without me, without telling me, and changing the name to "Wings of Silicon". Obviously, this betrayal left a bitter taste in my mouth. Had sin simply come to me, and been lik. "Listen buddy I know you were psyched about working on this second game with me, but. I want to want to work on this side project alone. I want to do what I want to do without relying on you to make the story." I'd have been much less upset and have been okay with that, had he simply asked me... but he never asked me is the thing, plus he changed the name of it. This really pissed me off, and fights were had because of this.
At this time I had been working a ton of extra hours real life because... Being homeless sucks, and I needed to be able to move to a new place and would rather not be homeless. So for a few months there I couldn't really spend much time on game development, and Sin had that to work on, and I said to Sin something along the lines of. "I'm gonna be busy RL for a few months. Come July I'll have been moved in for a week, and settled in and at that point in time I'll be ready get back to work on Damaged Goods." He gave me a nod, and a thumbs up about it, and I went along my way in april, may, and june handling my real-life situation packing boxes working extra hours, and all that stuff, and I was always looking forward to July to when I could get back to working on DG!
July comes around, and I go back to Sin, and I'm like "Hey I'm ready to work on DG again!" and Sin was kinda in the middle of a WoS update at this time, and was focused on that... Which is fine, and I'm thinking "Alright when that is done, we can get back to DG" so I wait for his release on WoS... Drop him another line... Once again not ready to work on DG... So look at Discord... No DG stuff in there.... Same with instagram, and twitter, and patreon and all that. If you look at any of those now you wouldn't even think Damaged Goods exist... but We got it put on hold, and Sin didn't want it on hold, but I Got it put on hold, and we had a fight about it.
I have messaged him a few times inquiring about getting back to work on DG, and he has been giving me the run around. This most recent time I was simply ignored, and so I go on the forums and saw once again another "update when?" post... It's like fuck it... Just call it abandoned it's clear Sin isn't gonna be on board, and I can't replicate his renders so that plane won't fly with 1 wing.
Anyways I'm not salty at Sin at all like I said I don't hold grudges. I don't hate anyone. I just want him to keep his promises, and stop being so... secretive... It's like he tries to be sneaky but gets caught so easily every time he does this... Boggles my mind. That he doesn't take the time to give me a simple message that would avoid MAJOR drama...
Sin said he was gonna get back to work on it when he gets better, and I'll work on it once more. If Sin wants a mediator to play middle man sending my messages to him that doesn't bother he can do that.
We will see where it goes from here.
