You speak like he's developing some sort of new tech that requires expensive resources to keep the project going.
I'm no Ren'Py dev but I don't think you need to spend over 1500 dollars a month to keep development for such game, maybe if you hire too many people to work on it and if you did, why would it take 4 months to write around 1000 lines of code and render ~300 images?
In this case it technically could, if the team saw it as a motivating factor to keep working and deliver their product.
No hate towards Xenorav but his main issue is the lack of communication. I understand he felt burned out and needed some time off to recover, but would it hurt to be upfront about it instead of going dark for a month, especially when he was already receiving complaints for the time he takes to update the game?
Again, take this as a shitty attempt at constructive criticism.
I wish Xenorav the best and hope he will finish the game, which is one of my favorites.
If you hire too many people you'll have to split the bills. 1500 is barely enough for one cause you need to buy graphic cards and PC for rendering and modeling tools tablets etc...
And making visual novels is pretty head ache.
You need to make the scenes with the dummies in another program sometimes requires 3d modeling and animations and then upload to renpy
and before that you need to render the graphics and animations and fix the issues with the animations because the dummies can act weird sometimes.
then check the physics to make it look realistic and all. If it's not right you will need to repeat or find solutions...
And I'm just making it short there are lot of things involved in the process, including the lines of code in renpy and debuging
Writing the story line and evolving the plot is another important point that requires time to write on paper and organize the storyline and incidents.
That's just the short version of the head ache to go through.
Videogames is an industry that requires lot of money and billions of dollars are spent every month to devlop games in the world and only few end up completed and many are abandoned.
visual novels is probably a work for one to 3 people but still it's very time consuming and can easily lead to burnouts.
especially when the story is not linear and has many routes...
and still 1500 dollars per month is not worth it for the head ache. but could be a good start.
I'm just bothered by the people who don't know anything about this and complain because they toss 1 dollar every month and call it contribution.
even though sometimes just a kind word and good encouragement is better for an artist than the bag of money sandwiched with ungrateful disbelief and rudeness...
