Hi erm, Long time lurker, and indie game designer here. I've been reading alot of messages of folks, defending and attacking this project. I thought I can at least explain to you some basics on game development so maybe future arguments can refer to this and move on to discussing past these points and address the real problems.
Let me clear this talk about the complexity of getting a high-fidelity output for this project is hard...it really isnt, Unreal engine 4 out of the box is one of the easiest development tools to get into. In fact, most devs are moving their projects to unreal not because it looks good, but because it looks good with little effort. This is because unreal engine blueprints helps easily get the ball rolling on developing mechanics using virtual scripting tools, and the engine gives some great out of the box post processing FX already set up.
Then comes the discussions of difficulty of implementing the actual gameplay mechanics of this game thats not the porn (the campaign). Look from what I understood of it, its going to be a shooter (third person or first no clue). let's assume on defeat you get the awesome defeat animation, girl gets pumped, take some health damage and change up some stats maybe, and finally resets. Thats a pretty easy loop ngl. I haven't gotten into game programming myself until early this year, I started a shooter prototype that I call the Skitarii proto. I developed the basic shooter mechanics of the game in 3 months (shooting, swap weapons, different projectile types, track ammo reserves, set up weapon profiles so that it's easy to add various weapon types etc) Basic animations of movement, shooting, reloading etc, can be found on the unreal marketplace and the free template that I used in my prototype works and looks really good. Popped in a AI to test taking damage and destroyed on health 0 and voila, shooter prototype is done. So thats a guy with ZERO game programming skills coming up with the basic mechanics of a shooter in three months(ish). Thats the beauty of blueprints on unreal engine folks, it's really easy to get into.
So if you think about it, the hard part of Operation Lovecraft was done a long time ago when all the first batch of monsters had the sexy animations done. It was a case of setting triggers to play one animation randomly from the large number of available animations on defeat/stun and making a fun game of it. I'm sorry to say this to the defense but this game should have had a proper release by now. The rest could have been amazing expansions, paid DLCs etc. As a game designer it is very clear this game is being kept in this slow burn to simply extract as much funds from the donators as possible.
I do not want to elaborate further on possible game design approaches that would have been sensible for this Project as it will be paragraphs long, but if you're interested, I can lay that out too.
If you were a person with spare time and rip the characters and animations out of this project, you probably could make a game of it in 6 months, using the massive number of tutorials on YouTube itself. Heck this may be an opportunity to build a portfolio piece and get your foot in the game development door.
This ends my constructive observation of this project. Happy fapping everyone.
