I honestly hate to be the sour egg, but i refuse to act like all the yes men in this thread and just lay out some brutal honesty regarding this game’s development cycle.
I wouldn't call them yes men, especially when quite a few of them were pretty against the game at the start of development.
1. The constant blueballing is honestly appaling.
Blueballing would imply we're deliberately delaying the game; this would benefit no one. We haven't broken even on the Patreon in almost two years now, which is why we're now forced to submit the game as of September 22nd, even with it likely not being 100% complete. (The voicework will be the main thing that'll have content missing, as well as a bit of polish here and there.)
We are on the what, EIGHTH delay now??? Just this year alone we have had Three delays (first was the february release, delayed. Then it was March 22, delayed to summer. Now we are getting it in the Fall season. It shouldn’t have been like this, especially when you move the goalpost when we are not far from release. You should have called an indefinite delay when you didn’t reach the original release deadline of april 2019, rather than constantly shifting it. The scope has been overwhelming, and it shows.
It shouldn't have been like this, no.
But, unfortunately, things happen. I'm not sure what else I can say besides this that I haven't said before, but when a complication arises and things take longer than we thought they would to make sure things work correctly/make sense in-game and in-lore/play well, that pushes everything else back as a result.
The scope hasn't changed since about 2016. I've got game design documents listing out the enemies, the mechanics, etc. dated to back then.
But even if that wasn't the case, why is a large scope an issue? People are free to back out of the Patreon anytime they want, as well as request full refunds
and they get rewards, indefinitely, from only backing once.
We set out to make a game that had a significant amount of content from the getgo, as intended.
All of the release date issues though are why we will
never have release dates for a game ever again, until the game is 100% complete and ready to ship. We won't even say what year it'll be complete in, let alone the month.
2. lack of transparency. Your weekly updates are lackluster and hardly ever gives us an idea of how much progress has actually been made, it’s usually the same text with minimal changes.
This is a bit of an exaggeration; I can't think of more than 2 or 3 of the weekly updates that have "the same text with minimal changes" all around the board. Almost every progress report shows a change in the amount of things left, etc.
We can't post huge, gigantic changes to the game, because the game
is almost entirely done. There's not really a way to post something like "finished three bosses off this week" or "completed five animations", because all the art is done, all the music is done, all the sound effects are done, all the maps are done, etc.
The remaining content to get done that we could list would be almost entirely backend stuff that would be either;
- pages and pages of bugfix information, most of which won't make any sense without context and/or would be spoilers
- things even more convoluted than that, like what programming got done to link the True Final Boss up to the main game, which can't really be "quantified" in a way that 95% of people reading the progress report would care to read about
It's also a pretty big time sink to write up a list of minutia of every small thing changed; I could fill a 3 page changelist since last week from just the tiny adjustments I'd done to the script, or another 2 page changelist from all the different things I worked through with Wishful Simping in terms of getting music actually laid out properly in-game in regards to volume levels (the mastering just finished yesterday for the game, now mastering has to be done for the soundtrack), and another 3 page document in regards to all the things done to the True Final Boss to get it in-game.
99% of people are not going to want to read through the minutia of that, so it's time we'd be better off spending working on the game, instead of collecting that data and going back over every small change we made and listing it.
However, the last progress report does say outright how many cutscenes are left, as well as describing what I've been doing on them.
People hate on eromancer for dragging things out (as we should) but atleast he provides a detailed update monthly with in game screenshots, render models and concept art for animations, scenery etc.
The biggest reason there isn't a lot of "content" in the progress reports, is because of spoilers.
Almost everything left we could show is gigantic, game-end spoilers, and as has been asked of us many times by backers, people on twitter, and discord, they don't want to be spoiled.
Blurring out the content only works on certain things too; if we blur say, the final boss, people are going either A) know who it is because we didn't blur it enough, or B) it'll be so blurred it'll be just a big blob of colors.
This has lead to many people (me included unfortunately) to walk out and stop following your patreon. Your numbers prove this, with about 4% loss every month for the past year.
We did know going into this that this would happen, and we would rather have people stop backing us than spoil the game for people.
However, we've always had people dropping frequently; from our exit surveys, this is usually due to people only needing to back once for rewards. So people use Patreon more as a sales platform than a crowdfunding platform (something Patreon has went on record saying they encourage people to do more of the former, than the latter).
Tho i’m happy to hear we are finally getting a release in september, after nearly three years of extra waiting. I hope it turns out well, both for you and the people who have stuck with you till the end (they deserve it).
We do as well; I think the amount of content we've packed into it will hopefully make up for the time the game's taken, for most people at least, even if we do have to spend the month after release finishing content/polishing things.
Finally, i hope you take my words to heart on your next projects.
I look forward to playing the game.
Thanks to work on Future Fragments, for future games, we'll have;
- an extremely solid team we can rely on across the board
- our own engine effectively that we can reshape as we need
- a much better workflow/pipeline that we've developed for both work and Patreon rewards/etc.
- a heck of a lot more experience and lessons learned, like not giving out release dates, ever
- posting progress reports from the start, so people can get substantial visual stuff unlike now
- not breaking apart demos and only posting demos every so often, instead of monthly, so we don't "flood" places with a ton of demos that make it hard for people to figure out which one to play
I do appreciate the feedback, and hopefully my reply here shows that we've got a lot of stuff covered for future games.
Why not both he writes a massive essay while at the same time working on the game?
That would be impossible, since multitasking is impossible, of course.
You are not a "sour egg" : just realistic. When you invest your money, you expect something in return. If you don't get the results, you don't pay anymore. A wider effect of these delays (in other nsfw or sfw games) is that it is pretty easy to become disillusioned when it comes to pledges to other projects too or just getting excited for a release date that is more prospective than based on more grounded goals. But maybe that is just me.
No, that's not just you; that is why we do have our three things we do of
- refunding people if they ask
- needing only one pledge to get rewards forever
- posting almost all patreon-based content publicly for those who can't afford to, or don't want to back us
