then why do you keep supposedly gambling by uploading a non-finished product?
Because we'd like to stick to what we said we'd do. However, we've been talking more with Steam in the last few days, they're off during the weekend, so we're waiting on a reply on Monday to get feedback on a few more questions we've asked about the process.
(Ironically too, now after us wanting to stick to what we said we'd do so much, now people are constantly asking us to
not do this and to instead just not give release dates anymore, despite us originally
not giving release dates, and people being upset we didn't give release dates, so they demanded we give one.)
You're still making Patreon money at a reasonable rate
Patreon hasn't kept us afloat since around 2021, we've had to increase credit card debt every month since then. If the game doesn't come out on the 30th / we don't get accepted for submission on the 23rd, then I'm going to need to take up the offer I've been given by a family friend to sell them my car/other valuables to keep going a bit longer to get the game to a more finished state for acceptance.
"well sorry guys but because of REASON we've had to push off another six months, darn"
We're nowhere near 6 months left of development time left; at most, 1-2 months.
so why is it that your game that has an obscene amount of dialogue for a smut game, a bunch of animation, so much content, etc is not good enough for Early Access?
Part of it is that Early Access destroys your algorithms some if you just hop onto it and then instantly jump out of it when you release in full a month or two later; it's meant to be something that you spend a lot of time in, and make a lot of effectively "pre-sales" in.
The other part is that Steam has said that we're
too close to being finished, and they heavily recommend not doing Early Access for that very reason.
Why haven't your Patrons seen literally anything of value in about a year? Your Patreon posts are leaked on Kemono, it's not exactly a secret that you've kept backers practically in the dark with the same progress reports you post here so its not like we can't publicly see how little you're doing to really reassure anyone on the actual status of the game.
I mean, we
did say in those same "leaked posts" (weird you'd note this when you simultaneously note we post everything publicly) that we were going to stop doing demos so we could focus on finishing things; when you do demos, you have to get everything playable, which means adding in/fixing things in a way that has to get removed/undone later, which just eats up time.
I'm not sure what you'd want us to post; everything left art, audio, writing, and gameplay-wise is spoilers, and has been heavily requested in polls, both public, on discord, and backer-based, to
not show that content.
Heck, we even just did a poll recently on our public Discord asking if people wanted us to post content we hadn't shown off before, and here was the results;
As you can see, overwhelmingly, people preferred us to not show anything, so we're not going to.
Just as it draws near every single time when you could just launch the game on other platforms to make a quick buck while you wait for Steam... yeah, no.
This was covered in other posts, but Steam has us under contractural lock, as they do all other people who have their game on their platform.
Once your game's on the Steam store page, even as a "coming soon" page, you
have to give them the most recent version
and it has to be published.
This means that if Steam doesn't accept the game to be published on Steam, you literally
cannot release it on other platforms until they accept it.
You must be registered to see the links
for more information on that.
Also, we're not in this to "make a quick buck". If we were, we would have done a lot of things very differently.
You are taking forever to finish the game, seems like the people working on it take their damn time to do just about anything, even the simplest of tasks (given your reports, some people have been at the same task for around 3-6 months or so), and you submitted the game to Steam knowing full and well it was going to get rejected while hyping things up on this thread.
Yes, some tasks are things that would take a 10+ person team a few weeks to do; that same task is being done by a single person. Like in my example, I'm doing the audio ripping, writing, continuity, marketing, level design, documents for sound/art/gameplay, cutscene creation, bug checking, finances, legal stuff, and about 20 other things. Each of those jobs would be handled by a single person on a regular game team.
So if I'm spending 10 hours in a day ripping voicework, then I can't devote any time to writing new scripts.
If I'm spending 10 hours in a day writing scripts, then I can't devote any time to ripping voicework.
If I'm spending 10 hours in a day injecting cutscenes into the game, then I can't write or rip voicework.
Same goes for programming and art demands; they can't do 5 things at once, they're only one person each.
As far as getting rejected while hyping things up, I actually specifically made posts saying
not to get hype about it, and telling people that I'm not going to celebrate
until we get accepted, for that very reason. I also said the reasons for submission, which was to specifically get the game out faster and avoid being hit with rejection down the line.
"look buddy, I have no fucking idea when this game will launch because, honestly, we screwed up big time, it'll come out when it's time."
We've tried this multiple times, and entirely different people come out of the woodwork to complain about no release date and that by having no release date, we are "obviously milking patreon" despite us not being kept afloat by it for over a year and a half now.
But ok, sure. I'll run a poll on Discord asking if people want us to do this very thing. If it succeeds, we'll do that (as much as we're able, since I'm not made of infinite money; there's only so many things I've got to sell to keep going).
If not, then we'll stick to what we said and keep trying to release ASAP regardless of ban risk.
