Looks like a game with potential. The high quality is good to see, but you'll understand if I don't entirely trust that it will be followed through. A game on this level with a one-person dev team is a huge undertaking and I've seen plenty of lower-effort games get ditched because of burnout. It's not a personal dig at you, but it is the voice of experience telling me "this is probably gonna be abandoned in a year".
I hope I'm wrong and this continues at this level of quality until it's properly done.
Hi, it makes sense to be not trustful, people have been burned many times.
Even I was burned by some projects in past, so that was the reason to start working on this on my own, to minimize the number of variables that can mess up this project. This way I can properly estimate my abilities and plan/promise only stuff that I'm actually able to deliver.
Luckily there is overwhelming interest in this project and soon, it will reach the state of being financially sustainable so there wouldn't be any reason to abandon it.
Burnout is a serious danger to the project and indeed I will try hard to avoid it.
And of course, I don't plan to work on this alone forever, idea is that I just need to be able to make it on my own if I had to. here is the reason:
(let's say you are an idea guy and pay lead programmer and lead artist. Maybe at most 50% of that money would go into development, other 50% would be lost on communication, staff not following with artistic vision, overestimating their abilities, quitting and leaving you without core developers, etc...)
In my case, I will outsource specific tasks (like animation, modeling/texturing, rigging, writing, voice acting) which is much more controlled, safe and will let me focus on critical parts and core features