I've thought of doing the exact same thing. I have these bouts of creativeness, but I tend to overextend and would honestly hate letting people down. Especially when money is involved. Last thing I would want is for someone to feel like I cheated them for a quick buck. Times are hard enough for most people as it is.
You can always just set the patreon to "pay on release only". That way it's essentially a shop, no "subscription", just "pay if you want to get this version"
I have two minds about this. Making an html (usually actually twine) game is easier than a lot of things that people do. It's easier than most jobs. However, it can become extremely difficult when people get in their own way. There are many different personality flaws that can cause this issue, and most of us (myself included) have potential paths towards a bad situation like this. However, if people don't self-defeat, it's actually easy if there's a structured and realistic plan in place.
I try not to comment on other people's games, Crush is doing a lot of great stuff with a lot of variables and is pushing Twine to its limit. Would the game be as successful if it wasn't for the custom character? I don't know. But I imagine it takes up a lot of time and is a technical nightmare to account for every single scene, then an expression change. I like the custom character stuff, but I could just do with a generic stylised portrait like the other characters. I really like the story and setting rather than the custom character stuff, which is just a nice bonus, but the writer's block must be real.
I do develop my own game(s). As I have said before, I refuse to reveal anything more than that, because of how the Internet works. Much of this is not at all how it is perceived. Who really cares if someone is angry? On the Internet, if one person is angry, one or more people will jump up to oppose them. It only becomes really bad once it becomes more than simply obvious (as in, Identity "the game"). Crush does work with others however. I'm not trying to claim too much about Crush, because to be honest, it doesn't help and I can't say anything with certainty. I do know that he has expressed dissatisfaction with FA progress, and so that carries more weight than other guesswork.
Not what I said, I just said from my own experience of developing a game, it gets more and more complicated as it goes along. Before I developed one, I wouldn't have said so. So I have sympathy for him and I think a lot of the comments are overly harsh. It's high quality, especially compared to 90% of twine games where they don't even align the text correctly!
It's true that some of the comments are too harsh, but some also give too much praise. The situation surrounding FA seems to be especially polarizing such that fair and accurate comments are rare and they often have little or nothing to do with FA itself. It's the nature of the beast here however, and this situation is likely inseparable from the way that Crush develops and occasionally self-defeats. This isn't the same as certain other games where a few trolls harshly criticize the creators for no good reason--instead the conversation focuses way too much on personality and can't seem to get away from it.
place yer bets! place yer bets! what could this patron-gated update be?
Crush significantly cut down on (arguably unnecessary) variety for the custom character after 1.6.3, so about 2 years ago now. That didn't really cost that many patrons, even despite coming packaged with another "I'm gonna start over". That suggests the custom avatar isn't as important to the game's success as many seem to think (and Crush presumably used to think).
WRONG! If you look closely at the release schedule, you will see there is no mention of the YEAR:
On the contrary. Now thanks to long covid, he can join the expanding ranks of porn game authors with persistent health problems, and will have a ready made delay machine any time he needs it.
I get what your saying, and in my first playthrough I did play the "consent" route and made the character be as slutty as possible. It was fun and hot and even though the dialogue really doesn't branch I had a good time. My issue is on second playthrough I decided to try a less slutty approach only to be railroaded into the singular story path. I said no to the manager which resulted in a game over. That's not giving the player a choice for consent, that's unavoidable story bottleneck. Wish there would have been a covert option to find dirt on the manager or something else as an alternative. You are supposed to be a government agent after all.
Dear lord, please don't give him more ideas... According to research it took 2017-COVID just to reach Bangkok. Please let our Female Agent finish one mission to completion before branching endlessly.
