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DecentMonkey, dude, really, you sound like a really Decent Monkey.
Know a couple things, your concept is sound and enticing. Your art is kickass. The story telling is really well done (even if the pacing could use some work, which you seem to be aware of).
Stick with it and I see you having quite the Patreon following.
Couple suggestions:
- The first RPGM styled version dragged on quite a bit and quite a few people complained about that (me included), don't mistake that complaint with people wanting the complete opposite by making things to short now. It's still supposed to be a game, so make sure there's some gameplay left, the originals pacing was a tad slow and repetitive at points. Overall I actually liked the pacing, just clipping certain things here and there to be a tad shorter was all it needed OR filling in the spaces that seemed to drag on with something interesting to do or see. Don't fall in the usual trap with RenPy that gameplay goes out the door and everything ends up sex scene after sex scene without much game in between.
- If you need any help proofreading, ideas, coding (although I have a feeling you're quite adept at that) or anything else, never be afraid to ask your Patreon community and here.
- Have a good idea of where you want and need to go with the story long in advance. A lot of these Patreon developers fall in the trap of having no idea where they want to take a story beyond their initial idea and either suddenly run out of ideas and just start posting sex scene after sex scene, or they fall in the trap of having a good idea but succumbing to Patron whining and demands to include every fetish on earth or remove certain fetishes, the "I want black cock rape in every scene" vs "Baaaaah, remove anything that can even remotely be considered NTR.
If you make a good game with an enticing story with good pacing, a whole lot more people will be attracted to your game than if you are just another dude catering to the fetish of a select group of loudmouths.
If your story and vision requires her to get into a gang bang, or your story requires her to get into a relationship with someone and then cheat on them, do so. If its not something you ever considered being part of the story, don't shoehorn it in.
I've been storyboarding a story/game for over a year now and when I'm done, I know I'll be able to split it up in manageable chunks of work and satisfying releases. No need to go overboard with it like I am, but be sure to have an overall vision from beginning to end and regularly spend some time on fleshing out that overall picture. It'll make developing, pacing and spreading the game over your updates much easier.
There's a lot of games that have story buildup, but then forego almost all story and gameplay to have an ever more rapidly escalating waterfall of every kind of fucked up thing happening to the main character to fizzle out because there's no more fucked up shit to happen to them so the game goes stale.
Have things happen for a reason and have people do at least some work to get the things to happen, every time.
- And, well, RenPy is python, don't feel limited to RenPy, a ton of RenPy games use shitty or no compression, limit themselves to file packing mechanisms provided by RenPy, etc. A lot of these games end up multiple GiB in size without even remotely needing to be. Challenge yourself to do better. You seem to be an actual capable developer, which seems rare with these types of games XD