The game itself doesn't look that good, and the animations are only "okay-ish", so a gallery would not be as fun.
There is for example this NPC, she offers you to you kiss her ass for reputation. And then if you agree she takes a selfie and blackmails you to share the picture if you don't give her 100 coins. It's actually just 2 poses and and only 1 single kiss animation.
A replay of this scene in a gallery would hardly make sense. You would see one character kissing another characters ass.
The fun lies in the fact that you permanently lose your reputation. You're being tricked. The girl lied to you. You've been humiliated.
And now you've lost reputation and gold, permanently, on your only safe file.
And the game is full of situations like this. I want to put the player in REALLY desperate situations.
How else could I cause a "fear-boner"?
This reply and the other guy makes me think that I did not go into enough detail of what a proper recollection room actually is in my mind. It is not about the animations, pretty much all of them can be seen by battling them, or revisitting them. It is about the context, the text that goes along with it. Text is important, if you are just seeing some sex animation that could mean anything, consentual, forced, awkward. You said it yourself, most of the intrigue comes from the context, and that can't be recollected via the current options because some of them are unique, which means to rewatch them you have to start a new playthrough at the moment.
You said:
"It's super easy " to make a gallery.
Well... It's not "complicated". But the amount of work is quite high, as there are over 4000 animations.
That's a good month of work.
And then the result wouldn't be "that" great. I would need a serious 2-3 months to polish it.
And I have players, excited and waiting to spend some time with their favourite NPC. An update that only adds a gallery would be a disappointment.
As someone with programming experience myself I believe you, I have seen some unimaginable code in my days after all .
If it is too much work, or you consider it a waste of your time, there is a rather easy way around. Just shift most of the workload off to the players if they want that kind of experience. How? In games that lack a proper recollection room for pictures, animations, and or specific encounters I usually make a makeshift one myself by manually saving right before all the scenes that are interesting to me, then I create and keep a file with notes that tell me which save slot has what content if I feel like experiencing that again. Just implementing a menu for various saveslots instead of one is already sufficient, which honestly should be there anyway to test different things out without the risk of messing up the current main savefile. The current limitations to saving make that too much of a pain sadly.
Also I think the fact that every other game has a gallery doesn't mean that my game desperately needs one. What my game really needs is clear from all the negative steam reviews. Most of them are about the graphics and the models. (Which will improve in FemU2, but thats another topic)
Need is too strong of a word. It does not need a gallery, it does not even need dialogue or items, it is nice though. With a certain genre come certain expectations, rpgs are expected to allow character progression of some sorts, horror games are expected to have tension, porn games should in my mind be expected to make the content that is responsible for most if not all of their appeal to be as easily available as possible in its entirety. That is just me though, seen my fair share of porn games without it, so I did what I described above, but even that is not really an option here, so your game kinda sticks out as one among a hundred in that regard, which for me leaves a bad taste.
Can't say that I have read the steam reviews, and yes the graphics are undeniably outdated even by niche standards, though I do not care much about graphics, half the games I play are 10+years old anyway. Bad reviews is not what you should be afraid off on Steam though.
PS:
The fact that you compare this game to what you call a "normal game" is hilarious.
Please go to Pornhub, open any porn and write in the comments:
"This video sucks, I watched Avengers Endgame from Marvel and that's way better!"
I think you should understand that porn-game-devs are not a 40 + people development teams.
Most of them (like me) have started game swith almost zero budget.
I for example am building things from cheap assets as best I can, and even like that I have to spend every penny and pretty much all my free time on the development.
Besides for (non-hentai) indie-game standards this game is awesome.
No offense, but I think you should understand that to the consumer, it is of no consequence what is going on behind the scenes of a game in development. They see a price tag and in their head they, rightfully, analyse if a game is worth the asking price compared to others. If your game costs 5€, they will compare it to other games that cost 5€, if your game comes short they will buy another one instead, that is the free market, no one cares about your limited manpower or funds, nor should they, they are customers at the end of the day, they want value. Reappearing customers have to value the added content, as they have already experienced the rest of the game, which is why I tend to take longer breaks with any of the Patreon games I support so that there is enough change when I dive back in.
Now obviously your game will almost always come up short in terms of the normal standards that are applied to games, because as you said as one man you lack funds, manpower, knowledge, software, experience and maybe even creative thinking to compete with people who have entire teams of experienced veteran developers behind them. Why does your game still have others buying it? Because it brings something to the table that other, even better quality games do not have, porn, more specifically femdom porn. It is a gap in the market and therefore has appeal to people who are interested in that, the overall quality of its mechanics being lower is easy to forgive for people who are into that sort of thing.
I was a second tier Patreon several times by now over the years, but aside from there being some things that kinda annoy me, like the whole recollection thing, I mostly enjoyed the game too, which is why I still follow its development occasionally even though I have not been a Patreon in a while. You got to understand that I have to look at the sum of what I have already spent on this game so far and ask myself if I should really put in another 5 for it though, and currently I am not feeling it, especially not repeating all the things that I have done so many times by now. I know the only thing I care about is the porn, and the porn is not easily available, I gotta play through most of the game for it.
I am interested in your other upcoming projects though, as they are new and promise a bit of a different experience from this one.
Also, nah, not awesome, it has its ups and downs, nothing is super bad or super good. It is a sandbox, that is just what it is, there are no big events or developments happening, no real story, you do not really impact the area around you much, and honestly, real talk, considering that you outright ripped some of your characters off from other sources without any shame (Bowsette, Earth, the 4 bandit girls from Monmuso Quest) I think you should be thankful that you have not yet gotten too much attention on steam because I'd expect some problems to eventually come from that in terms of copyright.