There are people who have specifically noted that the reason they backed the game/wishlisted it was because everything was voice acted, but more on that in a bit.
Also just to be clear, I don't own a house, nor did I sell one; it was my car I sold.
So I see this mentality often, and I get it because it does apply to a lot of other games... but it doesn't apply at all to us.
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We had a very specific plan for how many levels, enemies, content, etc. the game would have within the first month of development, as seen in this post; https://f95zone.to/threads/future-fragments-v0-27ex-march-2022-demo-hentaiwriter.1550/post-8788816
The content we did get rid of, as listed in the post above, wasn't extra levels or anything like that, it was stuff that would have been game-wide, mechanics type stuff for the most part. A lot of it we realized was just bad ideas period, regardless of budget or time, and the stuff that we would have liked to get in, we would have needed far more budget (like, 3x or more) and at least another 4 or 5 team members.
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Additionally, none of us are "paid per our work" on the core team (Frouge the programmer, Triangulate the artist, and me as writing/level design/marketing etc.); we split the Patreon cost evenly between us (after paying for audio work, which also to be clear, about $110k of it is voicework, $30k or so to music, and the remaining $10k to sound effects and audio mastering).
So even again, if we had a billion dollars, we wouldn't suddenly output more content than we had before, nor would we move any faster with our development, not out of "milking it", but because there's only so much we can do on a day to day basis.
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Regarding hiring on more staff too, not to sound arrogant about this, but finding people who are at Triangulate / Frouge's level in art / programming, who are also available to work on a NSFW game and aren't on their own games, who also are happy jumping on a project midway through, is like finding a needle in a haystack.
We got one programmer on specifically just to help with the True Final Boss Battle so we could get things done faster there (which Frouge paid for out of his own share, by his own choice), but to do that I had to go through some 20-30 different programmers, interviewing them, checking their qualifications, letting them know what we needed. Out of all of them, only 1 programmer fit the requirements we were looking for in terms of knowledge/skills/available free time (and we got super, super lucky), and it was only for one small portion of the game, walled off from the rest for the most part.
Even getting them up to speed with the existing code, despite their high level of skill, took a week or two, and that was again just for that small portion; trying to get them up to speed with everything in the game at that point would have probably taken months. This isn't because they're unskilled, it's because there's just so much stuff in the game.
Similarly, we hired on multiple other artists at different points, and Triangulate kept wanting changes to their art because he wanted things a very specific way aesthetically/continuity with accuracy in designs, to the point it was costing us more money to have the artists repeatedly correct the images than it would have been for Triangulate to just do everything, so that's why he ended up doing all the art.
(And as far as having someone extra on to help me with writing/cutscenes/level design, that'd be even more of a task get them up to speed and to somehow digest the hundreds and hundreds of backstory, worldbuilding, continuity, etc. stuff I've written up across like 40+ documents and keep things consistent there.)
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Finally, going back to an earlier point; we had a specific idea in mind for the game, and while we did adjust things here and there over time, we, from the start, were making the game that we wanted to make.
That means that even if a majority of people said "we don't want voicework in the game", we were still going to do it for everything. Same for the way the gameplay works, and many other things.
Don't get me wrong; playtesters and backers and just people playing the demos in general have given us a LOT of feedback, and we've adjusted a lot of stuff in the game as a result of it, like powerup functionality, map design, and so on.
But the core stuff (how many levels we would have, how many enemies, how many animations, the voicework stuff, the story stuff, that was the stuff we wanted in at all costs and that's why we'd do it regardless.
I'd say though that the majority of people enjoy the voicework, given the reviews on F95 and other places.
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tl;dr even if we had 5 billion dollars, we would still voice everything, still do the same amount of levels/enemies/game over sequences etc. and wouldn't be any more finished with the game than we are now, nor would we hire on extra people, because the way the game is, even if everyone else hates it, is what we wanted to make.
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Yeah, I understand, and I hope you realize this isn't meant to attack you either, this is just me clarifying how/why we did stuff, of course.
Going forward, we will never give release dates for our games ever again until the game is pretty much ready to go and just needs playtesting/some bugfixes, and even then, we'll only give the year it's going to come out on. Only when it's been submitted to Steam and accepted, will we give a specific, to the day release date.
Thanks a lot
I do think it'll be worth the wait, IMO.
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