Hey Raska, thanks for the feedback.
Hilarious. Progress wise it's the same as it was 1.5 years ago (see page 8 for people talking about progression to Bangkok), they've just been adding to the character creation system and redoing art.
Well...I think that the word "just" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
18 months ago, the game had recently broken $1k/month in support. Since then, we creäted:
- A complete RPG rules system (before this, we had no way to determine how good your individual agent was at fucking, shooting, talking, or anything else)
- The Lifepath, which allows you to define the backstory of your character (before this, we had no way to determine whether your agent was a rookie, a veteran, a desk analyst, or a field agent, nor how sexually experienced she was)
- A major avatar upgrade (before this, all agents had exactly the same face & body type)
All of these improvements were made in order to make my vision of Bangkok possible. I'm genuinely disappointed that they've taken so long.
There has been 0 progression content in the last year and a half, just adding in little stories and sexual history (which is beyond a waste of time unless they have those individually generated characters make appearances in... the seedy areas of Bangkok... Riiight.). This isn't a game, it's a character creator, and it shows no signs of being likely to ever progressing to be an actual game. Beyond frustrating, because what they claimed the game would be sounds like fun. Unfortunately they're making 6k a month (likely around 5-5.25k after patreon fees and fakes pledges), so don't expect them to change what's clearly been working for them.
Nobody can look into my cold dead heart, so everybody except me has to decide what they believe. Option 1 is that I deliberately develop the game much slower than I could, because I think that the Patrons will stop supporting the project if I work hard on it.
Option 2 is that I develop the game as fast and as well as I can, because I think that's what Patrons are paying me to do, and the delays are caused by me failing to achieve what I want to achieve.
Seriously – Option 1 makes
no fucking sense if you think about it. This is the line of criticism that actually pisses me off: not for my own sake, but for the sake of the game's awesome patrons, past and present. This line of criticism implies that these patrons are idiots who I've tricked, when in fact they're heroes who inspire me, and they are
literally the only reason Female Agent ever made it to version 1.2.
The truth is that I'm humbled by the fact that real people send me their actual money to keep me working on this. I develop the game as fast as I can. I think about it all the time, I'm leaving my job (which pays way better than Female Agent) and maybe my girlfriend to work on it more, and I am constantly "stressed" (which is the high performer's word for "frightened"
) about how long it takes me to get updates out. This is the line of criticism I agree with:
the process takes too long, Crush is not doing this efficiently, Crush could do a better job, Crush is not very good at this. My main desire is to figure out ways to speed up the dev process, and I
do try new things, so if you have any thoughts on this I am a receptive audience.
The amusing thing is I nearly became a patreon for this, but didn't since constant meaningless patreon updates (daily in their case) annoy me. Kinda dodged a bullet there.
My feeling is that if somebody is paying me between $1-50 of their hard-earned income for one or more months, they're my boss and they're entitled to know what I'm working on. I do get how a daily update could be annoying, though. (In general, the positive feedback for the daily updates is much greater than the complaints I've had about it.)