I think it is clear to everyone hat gumdrop is purposefully taking as long as possible to complete the development of this game.
The longer the development lasts, the more months he has to cash in on that 10k a month from patreon. This isn't a matter of incompetence and laziness, this is a matter of a man who has never had an opportunity to make so much money in his life taking full advantage of the opportunity he has now. And honestly I can't really blame him for that, I'd do the same thing.
While fully understandable, gumdrop fails to understand three concepts: Honour, Respect and longterm thinking.
Honour: You can be upfront with your audience without resorting to lying and misdirection. I could never justify to myself such crap behaviour gumdrop exhibits, it is an affront to my honour as a writer and man of my word. gumdrop fails at basic decency, because greed got the better of him. He spits on his own work in spirit. Even writers of pennydreadfuls, who do it openly for money, want to deliver quality work as much as the constrains of the situation allows.
gumdrop on the other hand talks much about quality, but how much quality cna be in it, if he states that he started working on the update about a week ago, when he is nearly three months late? Months he had enough time to make an update which could blow us away? Considering the good quality of his artwork, gumdrop could be several times the developer he his if he honoured his being a developer and worked with his early dedication on it instead the lazy, milking a... his greed made him.
Respect: gumdrop´s behaviour is a disrespect to the audience and his work. It is evident he lies and breaks promises made and tops it off with excuses which are an insult to our intelligence. Getting much money made him lose respect to his followers and his brainchild, since instead working on bringing about updates that make the eyes shine with joy, he deliberately gives out just passable updates to stretch the time as much as possible. DF has much potential which he deliberatly does not use.
He disrespects his own work with such behaviour.
When I look back at some of my earliest works, I know I could write them better today, but still I hold them dear, since I can say to myself I wrote it the best I could back then. That is what the creation of a novel, a game, a song, etc. is about. You have the idea and you do it the best you can at that moment in time. Gumdrop began like that until the money signs get up his head. Now he does just enough to keep most of the audience and his work suffers for it.
Longterm thinking: Yes, gumdrop takes in a lot of money and will for quite a time due to his milking ways. But what he does not see is that he burns goodwill and bridges to many fans of his game. When he starts developing a new game, many people will remember that and I doubt he will get as many patrons as DF does.
Had he kept up his ealry efforts with regular, fun, quality updates, Df would be an even better game and the audience would remember this. His second game would certainly get comparable or even higher numbers of patrons, giving him a long term nice income.
Now instead, we have enough patrons and audience of gumdrop here in the forum who are getting fed up with him. I doubt, they will be among the guys giving money to gumdrop when he starts a secong game someday.
