Thank you for your detailed reply, i'll keep this game on watch for now, forgive me if im not subbing immediately, not saying you guys will go this route but im done blindly supporting devs in this community that milk or abandon their games. But great start to a game. I hope you guys can turn this to a success.
Understandable, there is no plans to ever abandon this game. We will complete it one way or another. Low support completion = a truncated version with fewer renders animations and a shorter story. High support completion = a more full and robust completion as originally intended.
I may as well tell you, and everyone else a little bit about the behind the scenes here. Here is our Saga so far:
I can understand if people may be a little cautious and think we may abandon this project as we abandoned 2 projects independently prior to this. Third time is a charm.
My previous project was not monetized, and was made for practice, fun and learning a bit about using renpy. I don't have a rendering machine I use a laptop so I was relying on screen captures from second life to tell a story. I had considered drawing some stuff in 2d however when it comes to that sort of thing I have a lot of skill in photo editing, but I'm not so much in creating something from scratch on 2d. It would wind up looking like GGGB but worse visually. In second life the person who I had help me be one of my models they died of a heroine OD in real life was an old friend of mine. It just didn't feel right to work on that project anymore after that. So I went on the look for another developer who would be consider strong with visual arts making renders or drawing, but could use writing or coding.
Oddly enough one of the reasons why this game even began is a friend of mine died of a heroine overdose. That's fucked up aint it? The butterfly effect and what not. Made a new friend, made a new game. Great art often comes from tragedy. My friend who died of the overdose was a vegan. So Rose being a vegan is small nod to them after they are gone.
After a couple of months of looking Chris (SinAppeal) comes along I notice he is making a game. He was also looking for a writer in the forums. He was using Tyrano builder, and it sucks but he knows how to render. He actually dropped me a line saying he is looking for a writer. I evaluate the situation of his game. Some of the character models I don't like most of them , but I see his potential and I decide to keep one (Kelly's model is the only survivor from that game). He didn't have heavy Patreon support at the time I think like maybe 3 patrons?
So I figure we got two options here.
Option 1: Attempt to "Fix" that game.
Option 2: Start over from scratch as a team.
To fix that game that wasn't that far along in the first place would have been bad. It's like trying to build a house without a foundation. So we had to tear it all down and start from scratch with a better story.
So we start talking most days, and exchanging some ideas. We go on the hunt for better assets, and start building the game. We start building a workflow system and improve on it make it more efficient. Several months pass and we release on X-mas 2020. So far both of us have put in many hundreds of hours of work for free on top of buying expensive assets and electricity cost to render.
We won't be in the "Break Even Zone" at our current work rate until we are making about $1,150 per month, and that is with us working for free no pay at all and not doing anything about the debt that is racking up in the mean time. That is "Equilibrium" where the rate of incoming money finally matches the rate of money spent. The milking is going heavily in the other way at this moment, and may do that for a year or more, but we are okay with that as long as it eventually ripens and becomes an established game with good support.
Our overall goal is to be the most popular games in all aspects. We want to be #1 one day and that will be very tough, but we are going to try our best to get there. I would like to dethrone Dark Cookie from the top, but that will take a good 4 or 5 years probably to get to that point, but we have the talent and determination to do it.
I know right now that is a lot of big talk. Perhaps "Too ambitous" as some nay sayers have put it. Actions will speak louder than words.