Okay, so. My reply will be long and contain a bit of technical jargon, but you can't say I haven't tried the short version first ("you haven't done it, don't talk about it").
It turns out that for Hailey's we actually have access to the full source of the game using a tool called
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, so I can actually give you a lot of concrete examples showing that the game is a lot more complicated than you think. In fact you could probably look at it yourself and immediately realize how stupidly complicated it, but I suspect most people here are not necessarily fond of reading code, so let's not do that, instead I think I can explain a few insightful examples of problems found in Hailey, in a way that can be understood even by non-programmers. I hope that after you've read my little essay below, you come to the conclusion too, "Oh yeah, that's actually ##### hard" and that even your above average programming experience is not anywhere close to comparable. For the record, I've modded HTA a lot since its beginning, so the examples I'm going to show below are not made up, they are things I have seen myself in the actual game code (Hailey's).Introductory question. When you read the changelog of the last update and see something like "Added new enemy goblin", what do you think the code behind the scenes looks like? I'd bet most people think it looks a bit like this: the dev added a sprite for the enemy using Unity Editor, then copy/pasted the code of another enemy and changed it a little to add new mechanics. Or at least, you might think it's like 90% of the code and then maybe a few 10% extra.
In reality, you couldn't be more wrong. The part that you think does 95% of the game (drawing sex animations on the screen, moving the player etc.), required actually less than 5% of the work in the code, and vice-versa: the actual part of the code that is hard - so the remaining 95% - was spent on things that you probably never suspected even existed: state transitions and coroutines, constant physics/collisions reworks, enemy pathfinding/behavior/ collision. Again if you don't believe me, go look at the code yourself with DnSpy. Well don't look actually, there are about ~100 000 lines of code. But now you wonder, do we really need these 100 000, when all we care about are sex. And yes, we do. Here is why.
First of all, a problem that is extremely simple to explain yet extremely challenging for inexperienced developers to solve: duplicating code (or basically "copy/paste"). Imagine being LAGS 3 years ago trying to make your new game about a cute spelunker girl named Hailey. You release your first demo with one initial enemy (Scorpion) - very easy to code, you can even copy/paste the default Unity "enemy" template . Well you add a bit of custom code for sex of course. Now, 2nd update, you make your 2nd enemy the "worm". It has 99% the same behavior as a scorpion, so you copy/paste the scorpion code and edit the code a little bit, once again. Update 3, enemy nr 3 "spider" , you copy/paste again etc. Problem: Imagine at some point in the future, you have 10 enemies and have copy/pasted the same code 10 times. Now say you want to improve the code of the scorpion, because maybe you found a bug or something. You now have 10 times the amount of effort to do this change. Because you need to not just do it in Scorpion, but most likely for the worm too, the spider, etc. And believe me there were a lot of mistakes in that scorpion code that LAGS has originally copy/pasted, but anyways. Game only had a few enemies at first, so it seemed natural to copy/paste the enemy code, and that's what poor LAGS did. So first updates went super fast, 1 new enemy every month. Wow, incredible start! Players are super happy, finally a H-game that will get completed. Problem: after 10 updates, the game is kind of a chore to maintain because of what we just discussed. On top of it, the code for enemies slowly starts to diverge. The bat is like the scorpion, but flying. The zombie is like a scorpion, but it's tall, etc. Enemies don't have the same collision boxes, they don't react the same way to everything, so one day, LAGS fixes a bug in enemy 1 then copy/paste to enemy 2 a little too quickly, but it creates another bug in enemy2. For people who play the game, they don't even realize this problem, it seems like every time LAGS just adds a new enemy, it should be the same amount of work as what he's already done in update 1, but behind the scenes, every new enemy he adds, will multiply the maintenance work, several months later. But for now, LAGS doesn't think about it too much, he works hard and fortunately still manages to make good progress, but every time he fixes a bug, he needs to copy/paste it 10 times, that's quite annoying. So updates go a little bit slower. Players start wondering. Why is the developer taking longer and longer to release updates? Initially he released one enemy every month. Now it's been 2 months and no new enemy yet?
If you wonder the reason number ONE why so many games die a few months after updates after, that's why. Game starts fast because there's little code and it's easy to copy/paste pieces of code everywhere and manage 1000 lines of code by hand. After 10 updates, that process becomes impossible manually, and now you have to deal with it like an actual programmer would. But most people are NOT programmers, they are artists who watched a few Youtube videos on programming, and while Unity can definitely help releasing a surprisingly functional demo, it cannot teach them a job that requires years of experience. So ultimately, the code grows beyond the capacity of the amateur dev to maintain, so they give up their game and restart a new, small project, where they can copy/paste again. Repeat. Believe it or not that copy/paste problem (or more generally, duplication of code) is actually a very difficult problem to correctly solve, the way you typically avoid it in video games is by making extensive use of Object Oriented Programming, something even many developers don't understand well (and yes I'm aware if you've done computer studies then you definitely know about object oriented programming, but I'm asking you honestly, do you truly understand why actual video game developers use it? I definitely didn't until I had ~5 years of experience).
Anyway, let's go back to HTA. Fast forward a few months. Game reception has been overwhelmingly positive, so LAGS made tons of ambitious promises. There will now be a goblin enemy with gangbang animations, and multiple skins for Hailey! Hmm, but there's a problem. Back when the enemy was a scorpion, it sounded pretty fair to assume, that the scorpion sex animation belongs to the scorpion, right? The scorpion goes near Hailey, then triggers his sex animation, easy. The problem is, 2 goblins don't trigger 2 animations for Hailey, they still trigger only 1 sex animation. So it's not 1 sex animation per enemy, it's 1 sex animation per player (Hailey) which has to dynamically change depending on enemies nearby. Well, once again you as a player don't care much about that little detail. But behind the scenes, it's a big deal, and here we go rewriting the entirety of the sex code of the 10 previous enemies (copy/pasted again!), move all the code in the player script and use coroutines instead to synchronize the code of enemies and Hailey. Remember the 2-3 initial reworks? Many people thought it was a bit silly to rework a game. Lazy, stupid dev, why does he not just keep the game and just add new content? Why every new release is so broken? Well that's why.
Another problem. LAGS is not a computer scientist. So when he wrote the initial code, he obviously made a ton of programming mistakes. These mistakes don't look too serious at first, but they accumulate over each update. Maybe you were here around version ~0.2, do you remember when the player took more fall damage based on the framerate of your screen? Well, I'd bet most people thought, it's just a minor bug. In worst case, LAGS can just disable fall damage. Well, any computer scientist who reads that bug can instantly tell you this is actually a very serious bug. Not because of the fall damage, but because of what it says on the engine. When something like that happens, it means the physics logic is mixed with the rendering logic (FixedUpdate vs. Update, if that rings a bell), so for now it only seems to affect fall damage, but in reality it's the entire physics that is broken. And it's not just fixing the code of enemies this time. Every single object that was coded by LAGS needs re-examination, to find what needs to go in Update and what goes in FixedUpdate, then tested again, even for good programmers it's not easy to tell what needs to go where. Once again, I bet that you as a player read the changelog and see a small bugfix "fall damage tied to framerate", and you never suspected it, but behind the scenes that's easily 1000 lines of code changed and 10+ hours of work.
Fast forward a year. New bug report: Hailey can sometimes be in multiple sprites at the same time. If she gets stunned exactly at the same time that a monster is having sex, then both sprites display. Hmm. LAGS tries to investigate the bug, and learns about state machines. Well, once again if the game had been written from the ground by a professional developer, this bug would have never been possible, because they would have coded the player as a state machine (eg. state="Sex" , state="Knocked", etc.). But once again, LAGS is not a professional developer, he's an artist. He didn't know about state machines back then, so he represented states using booleans (isKnocked=True , hasSex=True, etc). How do we fix this? Well go through 50 000 lines of code and basically rewrite the logic for every single variable. We're no longer kidding here. That's probably a good MONTH of work for fixing ONE bug. But in reality it's not just one bug, it's a core issue, and LAGS knows it, the code is wrong and needs state machines. But players want SEX, they don't want state machines. We've already had 2 reworks, they are BEGGING for updates. So let's forget about state machines and keep accumulating technical debt.
Fast forward to version 0.6 (last one before Annie's update). Remember player script, that we rewrote because of the goblin animation? Well at this point it is so full of booleans (because there is no state machine), that script alone it is ~3000 line long, and we are now reaching quite serious technical debt level. The code is so full of bandaids that even game-breaking bugs have sometimes to be ignored because they are too hard to properly fix (like animation softlocking the game). I'm pretty sure LAGS has become very experienced by this point and KNOWS exactly what needs to be done. He knows he needs a state machine, and probably wonders all the time if he needs to do yet another rework, and the answer should yes, a real programmer would have done it, not because we love to rewrite everything, but because it's again, a CORE issue. That's when people like you come and imply that he is becoming lazy and has wrong priorities, and need to focus on adding even MORE content and even MORE technical debt. Picture yourself that at this point he probably works 8 hours / day just on code alone and is really fed up with it. Fine, whatever, let's go again with the bandaids, let's just deliver an update to appease people, even though we know it's not sustainable. Update releases with a few new animations, that's cool, but every planned feature that was a bit complex is cancelled. Levels, skins, bosses? All cancelled. "Ass-ass-in" enemy? worked fine before, but his pathfinding code is too specific and tedious to maintain, so let's just get rid of it next update.
Despite all his efforts, bugs accumulate, and players still complain that he can't keep up with the initial amount of content. He wants to rewrite the whole thing yet again, but he knows players will crucify him if he does another rework. The temptation is strong to just abandon the whole thing and just restart a new project from scratch. A completely fresh game, with a small codebase again, so an opportunity to make quick progress again, release new versions every month again. Well guess what? That's why LSH is born (my guess). Even better, it's a new codebase, so we can finally go with state machines and in long term it will be 2x easier to implement anything compared to Hailey. You're correct, the game is a distraction, but it is not a distraction that takes from Hailey's, it is a distraction that enables him to avoid burning out. LSH sells super well, and LAGS gets motivated again.
Finally, the Annie update. Took 6 months of work. You think it added a few levels and monsters for Annie, right? Well, true, but most importantly it added a massive ~10 000 lines of code, including ~1500 lines in PlayerScript alone. Once again, you probably never suspected this amount of code, but remember, PlayerScript is the script we already rewrote N times for Hailey in the paragraphs above. Well, Annie is a player too, so she must use PlayerScript too, except Annie can fly and Hailey can not, so we go rewriting the full thing again, and it is now 5000 lines long. I honestly don't understand where LAGS found the energy to write so much new stuff, but he did, while people were already complaining that the new content was meh.
Now back to the original point. We're now 1 year after the Annie's update, what has LAGS been doing. Has he been lazy? Has he been distracted? Here is my theory:
- Writing a codebase of this size is a hard task that very few people are capable of—and one that’s extremely in demand on the job market. LAGS would likely have earned more working for almost any decent IT company than he did selling his games. People who say he’s "scamming people", or imply he’s doing this primarily for money, are wrong. They show a lack of empathy and a serious misunderstanding of the IT market.
- LAGS probably spent 45+ hours / week in the first 2 years of Hailey's, considering the initial programming mistakes he made, and the amount of rewrites. That's only the time spent on development, not time to do the art, manage the administrative work etc. If he were to work that amount of hours in any IT company, the HR department would FORCE HIM TO TAKE A BREAK to avoid a burnout.
- Given the technical debt of the code and the amount of things that were cancelled, it is quite likely that LAGS is just bored of Hailey's code, and can simply no longer work on it 45 hours / week without becoming insane. Given these conditions, any decent IT manager would advise him to switch to side projects. Working for that long on something you don't enjoy anymore, would simply finish off your motivation and be simply counterproductive. Once again video game development is HARD, it's not something you can do correctly while being tired, stressed, depressed, etc.
- Keep in mind people burn out all the time in IT despite working a LOT fewer hours, being paid a LOT more, interacting with customers that are a LOT less toxic than what LAGS is doing. Hence, having a burnout was never a matter of if, but when
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