First time i have heard of this. but it doesn¨t matter because....
TBH, not sure how, since I broadcast the refund thing all the time here and other places, but at least I'm glad you know about it now.
we are seeing poor management now by you taking time writing out these detailed replies rather than working on the game. And perhaps not faster, but without constant delays.
I make it a rule to always multi-task if possible; I only take a few minutes to write these replies, and when I do so, I do it while something else is going on that would prevent me from writing/doing other focused work.
ex. important phone calls, or on the toilet, or about to go to sleep, things where it would be too much of a distraction to focus on writing and maintaining story continuity and other things that require a lot of brain power, but writing a reply in a forum is a lot easier than doing writing for the game, so I can do both things at once.
The reply I initially wrote to you, for the record, took 12 minutes.
The delays, all of them, have been entirely because of a specific cycle;
- go to implement thing we've been planning to implement for years, estimate it will take 2 weeks to implement
- spend 2 weeks implementing it
- realize that it's not fun / is severely broken / has other issues
- discuss how to rework it or if we can afford to scrap it altogether without ruining the game
- either rework it or scrap it and adjust the rest of the game as such
- thing that was supposed to take 2 weeks has now taken a month
- repeat with half of the content in the game
We don't want to just slap something in and go "well, it's not fun, but hey, need to get it out ASAP at all costs, let's just leave this un-fun thing in there" like many companies and games do. Think of your favorite video game; can you think of portions that are just boring, poorly designed, unfair, unfun, etc.? That's the result of those companies just drilling content out and not going back to refine it or adjust it.
We don't want to have that in our games. It doesn't mean our game will BE constantly fun to everyone, but from
our perspective, there are no "weak spots" in the game like that thanks to going back and refining/reworking things to make sure it works as intended/is fun.
No one is forcing you to a certain deadline. You're self-publishing, you set your own deadline, and considering how much work there still was to do, i'm still wondering how you ever thought you could get them out by that time?
See the above cycle of events for the answer to that one.
We are the ones forcing ourselves to release by a certain deadline, because we are both financially bound and time bound, in that we have a zillion games we want to make and we don't want to spend our entire lives on just one game.
Please understand that it is not so much that it's taking so long, it's the constant deadlines that aren't met, time after time.
I do understand this, and have understood it for some time, which is why we're not going to have release dates for future games, ever.
But for Future Fragments, if we just suddenly said "ok, no release date" for it this close to the end, people would surely take that as a sign of "welp, it's never coming out, will be milked until 2050" etc.
you misunderstand me. This wasn't to discredit your work. This was to temper the expectations of people i have seen that are becoming way too hyped at the word count, that unfortunately isn't a lot. ME can be finished in a day, if you ignore side content, and your work is about the same length. And i bet most of those words are for those 80 endings you're making.
I do understand that, and that's why I said I wasn't harping on you specifically, but clarifying why those people were surprised at it, per it being done by one person who's also doing 20 other things and with no other help etc.
And no, the 21 true endings are only about 1,500 words each, with the 20 other secret endings being about a fourth of that each. The cutscenes make up the massive majority of words.
Just to clarify how the cutscenes work;
Here's a bunch of databanks, with the databank stories they're linked to (the third column) and cutscenes that they change the events of (the fourth column). There's 157 databanks, and 221 cutscenes.
Interacting with cutscenes or databanks will change future events/future story choices and possibilities when interacting with characters as well as core storyline cutscenes.
Who you kill and who you don't kill affects this too, as well as your 8 "Ideal" variables, which can further open up/lock out choices or events in cutscenes.
Even some other variables like how many times you've respawned, how many enemies total you've killed, how many Fragments you have, how long you've spent in a level, how many maps you've cleared, or even how many times you've pressed the down button/ducked can affect scenes.
Here's the "base" collection of all the interactions between cutscenes and databanks, although by now, there's probably double the connections;
The numbers and letters here correspond to the cutscene/databank number, and if it's a cutscene or databank, as well as what level it's on.
For example, four rows down, and five columns to the right, you can see;
86d(fi) - 94d(fi) - 171c(end) - 138c(ea)
This means that databank 86 and 94 in Fire, if you read those, will change the events of both cutscene 171 in The End and cutscene 183 in Earth, and that those two cutscenes will also be affected by choices made in each cutscene (so if you interact with #171 first, instead of #138 first, or vice versa, and whether you kill them, what your ideals were, etc.)
On top of that, this is just the NPCs; this isn't counting events with Faye, Vie, or solo scenes, end path scenes, game over CGs, and a lot of other things.
it's impressive given your already insane workload, but let's not pretend you are writing a novel and not a script for a visual medium.
Yes, it is a visual medium, which means I don't have to describe things around the characters in most cases. That still doesn't make it any less or any more worthy writing-wise. (Also, according to google, the average novel is 90,000 words, with big stories being 125,000+ words. Even War and Peace is 580,000 words, so I'm not sure why the novel vs game script comparison.)
Maybe you should focus on those then.
No matter how you scratch it, the current discourse here is one of your own making.
How can I focus on them any more than I already have been? I'm not sure what you mean by that statement.
