I see a lot of people complaining about bugs and shit, as a programmer I'd like to point out it's not an easy job and nobody's forcing you to play or anything, much less taking your money, so bitching just makes you look spoiled. Also, most likely the author doesn't have a lot of experience with coding which makes debugging a lot harder, not to mention it takes many years to get to a level where you actually know what you're doing, pretty much every programmer I've known spent at least a decade doing guesswork, producing confusing and buggy code etc., and that's some 19 years worth of being a programmer (15 working professionally) and being friends with many other programmers.
With that said, of course that doesn't mean it's okay to do a shitty job and ask people to pay for it, but the point is, if you don't like it, nobody's holding you. On the other hand, if you wanna help make the game better in any small way you can (And I believe most of us do), it'd be nice if you pointed stuff out politely. I know it's a pain and frustrating and sometimes we need to vent, but it's like driving behind someone who's learning: You've been there, so you can understand them, you just gotta take a deep breath and be patient, you're gonna make things worse for eeryone if you starting pressuring people when they're not ready for it.
Some suggestions that seem great until now, kinda summed up and with some additions:
- Stop messing with the engine. Do the other stuff, there's more than enough work, and do not mess with the engine at least until you have a solid game and a reasonable amount of experience, to minimize the risk of you doing more harm than good.
- Walkthrough/Guide/Bugs/etc: people need a way to check IF the content is over or not, and HOW to find the content so they know if they're missing something or if there's actually a bug. You should have some storyboard/outline/reference/etc., just put some of that stuff together, at least so people know when events that were supposed to trigger did not (i had a load of time trying to advance a couple times, to the point I started a new game and just started doing everything differently).
https://f95zone.to/threads/fountain-of-mana-v2-0-nerion.534/ actually has the shittiest awesome walkthrough I know of, it's kinda shitty 'cause it's very simple, crude, and looks kinda messy, but it's actually awesome because it, works as a reference for developing, debugging and playing and is shipped with the game. Not pretty but does an amazing job, IMHO.
- Feedback: It's awesome, but keep in mind you should decide on a general direction and ask for opinion on smaller events/variations that don't actually change the direction too much, or you'll end up with a shitty game that makes no sense.
- Translations: Yeah, English is not my mother language so I get it, still, it will be a lot easier to get people to play the game and become patreons if you improve it, it doesn't need to be perfect but it's pretty bad right now.. Since money can be an issue and perhaps you don't have anyone that can help you, I recommend you ask Patrons or people on Forums or whatever. To give an example I just thought of, If you release one version ahead for Patreons, you could offer a deal to people who are NOT Patrons, where they'd send revisions for one or two dialogues of the current public version, then you check if the general meaning is okay, and then make a poll with the revised version(s) (Without including the name of the person who did it) asking either if it's acceptable (if you only asked or only got a reply from one person) or which version is the best (Just remember to include an option to reject all translations, to make sure it's actually done properly). I can assure you many people will want to do it. Heck, I would actually love to help with something, there are many devs I want to support but can't afford to. Other options include stuff like Grammarly, but I don't know how well it actually works so I'd stick with asking people to help. And if you need a way to check the quality, ask patreons' opinions on the translations using polls, discord or whatever.
-Lastly, as a pro-tip on the coding/debugging stuff, tests are pretty hard, it's not easy to find capable people to help, and you probably don't wanna make the game open source, so as a minimal-acceptable-testing I suggest you write adocument, text file or whatever, with one or more playthrough examples that will get ALL the content of the game, make it VERY specific, including each action you take and each option you select. Then, before releasing a version, play the game following the example(s) perfectly, and check if you can access everything. With this, whenever a bug appears, you can give people a workaround that you're sure works to give them, plus you can compare what they did or did not do with the playthrough so you only have to check what is different. Obviously the ideal is having unit testes for everything and a REPL/Debugging Console and code that doesn't cause any side-effects, but since life's not perfect this suggestion should help avoiding a lot of bugs.
In my experience bits of code that do too much unrelated stuff and/or not following some necessary order (Or in some arbitrary/random order) are the cause of most bugs. It's hard as hell to organize code, yeah, but experience and having other people looking at your code (Or preferrably wotking together) makes it A LOT better.
