Does this mean anything? These updates all sound like things that should have been taken care of already, especially when your release date was initially set years ago.
As addressed in prior posts, the biggest issue with the release dates has just been underestimating how long certain things would take to do.
If you knew you had say, 30 tasks left to get done before your own game was complete, and you'd talked them out, made plans for them, etc. and laid them out thoroughly, and estimated they would take 1 year to get them all done, you'd say as such.
So you start on the 30 tasks.
Task #1 you estimate to take 2 weeks.
2 days into it though, despite all the planning and such, you realize a critical flaw that you, nor anyone else on the team saw. This critical flaw means that one part of Task #1 you thought would take 2 hours, will now take 3 days to sort out and reconfigure things.
So 2 weeks go by, you get the task done... only to realize that all the planning in the world isn't the same as actually playing it. Prototyping the gameplay for this task wouldn't work either, because the issue at hand wasn't something that was noticable until everything was in (audio, art, gameplay, story, lighting, physics, etc.)
Because of this, you need to go back to the drawing board and figure out a better way to implement Task #1. This takes another few days of trying out things and builds and such.
It's now been 3 weeks; you were supposed to have Task #1
done at this point, but now you've just been able to start on reworking it. Now multiply that by the other 29 tasks, sometimes less time, sometimes more time, and you can see why we would be able to estimate it'd take us a year when it took us three years+ since the initial assumption of release date.
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People often have questions/responses/critique about the whole thing, which i'll pre-emptively answer here, too.
"That seems very unorganized/unprofessional/poorly managed to have things mess up that often."
- Well, yeah. We're not some killer AAA studio with 50 games under our belts; we're 3 people on the core team, one on art, one on writing/level design/everything else, and one on programming.
- In an AAA studio, if something's wrong with some sort of art asset, the other 100 artists can keep going. Our single artist can't do that; they have to focus on fixing the problem and while they do, no other art can be made. Same goes for the programmer or myself on level design/writing etc.
- Additionally, AAA studios reconfigure things all the time. Again, you just notice the impact more because we're this small of a team.
"Why are you so bent on making sure things work good? It's just a porn game, who cares if things have issues."
- We care, because we don't want to take people's money and just give them a low effort game with major issues. If we were just here for a cash grab, there's way, way more profitable industries that take way, way less work than that that we could do.
"Just remove content then to get it out faster."
- Same thing as above. We're not going to do that.
- Besides, people constantly say they want quality games. Quality takes time.
"Okay, so why not hire more people on to get more stuff done?"
- The problem is a combination of finances and availability, here.
- We've got very specific visual, audio, gameplay, story, etc. setups for this game. Trying to train someone to "get" all of those things would take more time than just doing it ourselves.
- Additionally, finding a skilled NSFW creator who isn't already busy with 1) their own commissions and projects and 2) who is up to work on a NSFW game and has the skillset to do so is incredibly rare to begin with.
- That said, we HAVE hired on a second programmer for the True Final Boss Fight, and they've been doing great...
- ...but that's ONLY for that fight. Our programmer is giving up his cut of things and giving it to the second programmer, because we literally could not afford to pay two programmers at once.
- As it is, we're in debt up to $40,000+ and the Patreon hasn't made enough money to keep us afloat in over a year. So we couldn't sustain our main programmer not getting paid long term, hence why we can't just hire on new people.
"No one cares about all the voicework in the game, if you got rid of that the game would have been out sooner and it would have had more content."
- If the game had no voicework it would still be taking this long to come out. The remaining content includes voicework, sure, but it also includes writing and programming.
- Additionally, TriangulatePixels, our artist, gets an equal cut of the Patreon money, the same as FrougeDev (the programmer) and myself. So no amount of extra money is going to make him do new content; he's not getting paid per piece, he's just getting paid per month.
- He effectively does what art he wants, when he wants, how he wants. No amount of money is going to change that.
- If you think that's poor management, then that's on you, because I got into this specifically to not control people like they're cogs in a machine or tools to be used; I want people I'm working with to be able to have degrees of freedom instead of just doing what I say or whatever else.
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So with all that said, we're still aiming to submit to Steam, complete, by September 22nd.
And if it's not complete, well, we're just gonna have to complete the rest within the next few weeks afterwards, because we don't have the finances to keep working on it without releasing it until the "sales season" of October-December is done. That sucks if it does come to that, but it is what it is.
