If anyone's interested, here are a few thoughts about the creation of Descent.
In total, the game took me about 14 or 15 months to create, working on and off. This was the first time I had ever used Renpy and DAZ, so the learning curve definitely slowed down the process somewhat. By far, the most time-consuming aspect of the project was the rendering. Each of the fully rendered scenes took anywhere between 30 - 90 minutes to render, and sometimes had to be redone due to errors I failed to catch before starting.
The game took about six weeks to post in its entirety. I made two significant changes based on player comments once I started posting. The first was to add an additional option during the scene at the end of chapter one. IMO, that was a good change. When I originally put the game together, I did not appreciate how problematic that scene would be in the context of being the only sex scene in chapter one and, initially, the only sex scene in the game. That change, IMO, improved the game.
The second significant change was to add an option to avoid the club scene with Eve and friends at the end of chapter six. I'm kind of "meh" about that one. I considered, and could have added, the ability to avoid more Eve content, but it became kind of complicated and, in the end, I decided that I didn't want to spend too much time providing ways to avoid content which I had already spent a lot of time creating.
Apart from that, the changes were relatively minor, just tweaking.
I greatly appreciated the thoughtful comments about the game, even the criticism.
On the whole, I was happy with how the project worked out. While some elements of the execution did not work out as well as I'd hoped (discussed below), I was generally satisfied with the end product. In other words, the game I originally envisioned when I started out is pretty close to the game I eventually created. The compromises were minimal.
So, what didn't work, IMO?
Obviously, the quality of the renders is not as good as it could have been. I did my best, but my "talents" as a visual artist are obviously lacking and my technical knowledge, and computer power, obviously fell short. I don't know what kind of computers are required to create the ultra high-quality renders and animations I see in some other games, but I know that I don't have one.
The use of music is something I wrestled with when creating the game. In the end, I went with very little in the way of music. There is one scene with source music (the club scene) and two scenes with an actual soundtrack (the Troll King and the epilogue). Maybe I could / should have done more, but the trouble with that is once you start incorporating a soundtrack, you're pretty much obliged to use it throughout. The music I did use was fun to create, but it would have added a lot of development time to write and record a complete soundtrack.
The other issue I really had trouble with was writing the MC. The supporting characters were all pretty clear to me, and I'm happy with how they turned out, but I went back and forth a lot on whether to develop the MC's internal thinking in certain directions. For example, a couple of people have posted that they would have preferred to see her develop more as a willing participant in the lesbian scenes. In the end, I went with a fairly neutral stance (ie. the MC never really developed any predilections prior to the epilogue). If I was doing the game all over, I think I would have had more options in which the MC developed inclinations and developed them as different paths to follow. But I'm not, so it is what it is.
Going forward, I have no plans to do another game of this nature. I do have an idea for something quite different, but no idea whether I will proceed with it. It requires more knowledge of python than I currently have.
Thanks to everyone who tried (and will try) the game, even if they didn't enjoy it.