Alright, if design goals are your fav subject, let's take a quick look at your "if you had done Bangkok after ver 1.x" options and see why people might have had some issues.
After 1.0:
Character customization features are nice, and a lot of people like them, but you already had options (if randomized). Granted, you were trying to sell a game with (eventually) character customization, but you took what was just a demo Sugarcube introduction to the story and put a menu on the front of it. There were maybe 5 choices in the game at that point, and it really could have used fleshing out the story, but your first update was a menu and drawing faces. Admittedly, this did only take about a week, so it wasn't that big of a delay.
After 1.1:
1.2 was actually a useful update. You were going to need a framework for sex eventually, and you'd put yourself in a position story-wise to get it done immediately. This was a good use of time.
After 1.2:
First of all, the nightclubs are only currently the sexiest parts of the game. If there is never planned to be anything better in Bangkok, what's the point of Bangkok being in the story at all? You don't play world 2 of Mario and then say "I don't need to play world 3 because this world is my favorite that I've seen so far!" You go on because it should get better.
Secondly, unlike the previously released scene, these club scenes weren't set up beforehand, and you no longer needed an intro into the sex mechanics. You had to spend time writing story, but instead of writing it in Bangkok, you wrote it prior to the mission. These sex scenes literally could have been the beginning of Bangkok. 3.5 months to get out an update with new writing, but you didn't advance the story forward.
After 1.3:
1) Things are still random. You're "RPG rules" still make random outcomes, you just have a set framework for tracking stats. Having a framework is useful, though.
2) You spent WAY too much time on this rule set. You're essentially using the exact same rule set as every other RPG ever with one difference: most of your stats don't matter. I can't use 100 xp in speaking Spanish, so why am I getting it, why do I have to see a pop up, and why are you wasting memory/code/time tracking it? Also, since it's the same as every other framework, why did you need to code it yourself? I highly doubt it's never been ported to sugarcube before, and even if it hasn't, you should be able to base it off of someone else's code anyway to have been much faster.
3) The lifepath really didn't add much to the game going forward. None of the sex partners from the life path are ever referenced, your college and extracurricular activities have no role to play, and no one mentions your family. People got upset when the Mass Effect 3 ending was "choose a color", so why wouldn't people be ticked off that you added in something prior to the story that has no effect on the game itself?
After 1.4:
In practice, this should have been fixed later. Also, the only extra work gained by waiting would have been using assets you already had on the first pass, and searching through the code to find where the replacement assets needed to be put. You need the new artwork for Bangkok regardless of if you draw the assets first or write the story first. There is zero "extra" new drawings made by waiting. You still need them either way.
This, however, isn't quite the real problem, because IIRC this is when you brought in someone new to do the artwork. They made all of the art for 1.5. The problem is that you spent your time coding the new artwork into the game, when the artist should have done that. You should have been spending those 6 months writing story.
After 1.5:
You're right. The sex scenes would have been the same, and people would do a lot of clicking without really reading the passages. You don't want that to be the final quality level of the game? Great.
That doesn't mean that it needed to be fixed first. You had a reasonable placeholder event, and there are only 5 places it's used in the entire game, and the amateur backstage video was made to be unique (to a degree) already. You didn't need to upgrade them until there were a decent number of them in the game in the first place. They don't seem repetitive now because they're too low quality, they seem repetitive because the game demo is so short.
Worse, the fact that you've allowed your perfectionist side to get the better of you here means you'll likely have a harder time writing Bangkok, because you will also have to write full sex scenes at the same time instead of using a generic placeholder to get the main story prepared before going back and polishing.
You claimed to be making a game about a spy working in a brothel in Bangkok, but aside from update 1.2 and a small portion of 1.4, you haven't made progress toward actually having a game about that. You've spent a TON of time working on things that really should have been low priority tasks.
I honestly think you've really hurt yourself a lot in this project. Instead of making a good, basic framework to build off of, you've tried to make a highly detailed introduction. That's going to change how you approach building the rest of the game, and I think you're setting yourself up for failure by focusing on low priority tasks and delegating tasks inefficiently. Good luck though.
After 1.0:
Character customization features are nice, and a lot of people like them, but you already had options (if randomized). Granted, you were trying to sell a game with (eventually) character customization, but you took what was just a demo Sugarcube introduction to the story and put a menu on the front of it. There were maybe 5 choices in the game at that point, and it really could have used fleshing out the story, but your first update was a menu and drawing faces. Admittedly, this did only take about a week, so it wasn't that big of a delay.
After 1.1:
1.2 was actually a useful update. You were going to need a framework for sex eventually, and you'd put yourself in a position story-wise to get it done immediately. This was a good use of time.
After 1.2:
First of all, the nightclubs are only currently the sexiest parts of the game. If there is never planned to be anything better in Bangkok, what's the point of Bangkok being in the story at all? You don't play world 2 of Mario and then say "I don't need to play world 3 because this world is my favorite that I've seen so far!" You go on because it should get better.
Secondly, unlike the previously released scene, these club scenes weren't set up beforehand, and you no longer needed an intro into the sex mechanics. You had to spend time writing story, but instead of writing it in Bangkok, you wrote it prior to the mission. These sex scenes literally could have been the beginning of Bangkok. 3.5 months to get out an update with new writing, but you didn't advance the story forward.
After 1.3:
1) Things are still random. You're "RPG rules" still make random outcomes, you just have a set framework for tracking stats. Having a framework is useful, though.
2) You spent WAY too much time on this rule set. You're essentially using the exact same rule set as every other RPG ever with one difference: most of your stats don't matter. I can't use 100 xp in speaking Spanish, so why am I getting it, why do I have to see a pop up, and why are you wasting memory/code/time tracking it? Also, since it's the same as every other framework, why did you need to code it yourself? I highly doubt it's never been ported to sugarcube before, and even if it hasn't, you should be able to base it off of someone else's code anyway to have been much faster.
3) The lifepath really didn't add much to the game going forward. None of the sex partners from the life path are ever referenced, your college and extracurricular activities have no role to play, and no one mentions your family. People got upset when the Mass Effect 3 ending was "choose a color", so why wouldn't people be ticked off that you added in something prior to the story that has no effect on the game itself?
After 1.4:
In practice, this should have been fixed later. Also, the only extra work gained by waiting would have been using assets you already had on the first pass, and searching through the code to find where the replacement assets needed to be put. You need the new artwork for Bangkok regardless of if you draw the assets first or write the story first. There is zero "extra" new drawings made by waiting. You still need them either way.
This, however, isn't quite the real problem, because IIRC this is when you brought in someone new to do the artwork. They made all of the art for 1.5. The problem is that you spent your time coding the new artwork into the game, when the artist should have done that. You should have been spending those 6 months writing story.
After 1.5:
You're right. The sex scenes would have been the same, and people would do a lot of clicking without really reading the passages. You don't want that to be the final quality level of the game? Great.
That doesn't mean that it needed to be fixed first. You had a reasonable placeholder event, and there are only 5 places it's used in the entire game, and the amateur backstage video was made to be unique (to a degree) already. You didn't need to upgrade them until there were a decent number of them in the game in the first place. They don't seem repetitive now because they're too low quality, they seem repetitive because the game demo is so short.
Worse, the fact that you've allowed your perfectionist side to get the better of you here means you'll likely have a harder time writing Bangkok, because you will also have to write full sex scenes at the same time instead of using a generic placeholder to get the main story prepared before going back and polishing.
You claimed to be making a game about a spy working in a brothel in Bangkok, but aside from update 1.2 and a small portion of 1.4, you haven't made progress toward actually having a game about that. You've spent a TON of time working on things that really should have been low priority tasks.
I honestly think you've really hurt yourself a lot in this project. Instead of making a good, basic framework to build off of, you've tried to make a highly detailed introduction. That's going to change how you approach building the rest of the game, and I think you're setting yourself up for failure by focusing on low priority tasks and delegating tasks inefficiently. Good luck though.
