I do imagine that it requires a great deal of thought, preparation and work. It hasn't acquired status by being shoddy. If so, then people really would have something to complain about.
Yeah, no. He is almost surely lying about his hardware and about hiring new people (ask yourself, why didn't he hire a webdev?). Think about his past tactics: a "remaster" that took months, missing his own deadlines pretty much every month, poorly rendered monthly pictures, terrible pacing of the story and overreliance on cheap plot devices like dreams (the last update at least improved in that regard but it's not enough), his announcement that he wants to add "minigames" (and will hire several people for that too apparently). All work in the same direction: slow the game down and give him excuses to become slower. Pretending he is not being shoddy at all is unreasonable. That you have swallowed his advertisement does not show he is not being shoddy, it just shows that you are susceptible to manipulation, probably because you think the rendering he does takes a lot of time which is a lie considering the hardware he claims to have.
Also lmao at "great deal of thought" when the current story is barely more than teenage melodrama without almost no substance or underlying rationale to back it up. That's why "fans" of this game end up doing more work than Gumdrop himself in filling the blatant plot holes. If you are spending so much time theorizing about such a simple story like this one then chances are it's poorly told and not as deep as you think it is. Even fanfic stories frequently have more depth than this incoherent, numbness inducting mess that barely moves anywhere. And to claim his renders are great is also debatable, as the scenes are barely populated (hence why he needs so many zoomed in renders).
What annoys me the most about the people wanting to silence criticism in this thread is that there are multiple game threads where people regularly criticize the dev and the game, yet nobody seems to care. Why the special treatment here? ask Dark Silver how he was treated (even though he always met deadlines), see the Monster Girl Island thread, or of any game with awkward english to see what spammy criticism looks like. See what happened with Teacher's Pets when criticism was silenced, they circlejerked themselves out of existence.
Criticism, when well articulated, is good for consumers (especially for those who are on the fence about pledging) and for non-egocentric devs. How could anyone debate this? wanting to make every single part of your online presence a circlejerk is quite honestly creepy. You have Discord for that. Let public forums be diverse.
