With the Patreon format i also think there's an incentive to keep the story progress extra slow, concluding a game and moving to a new project is a risk, some devs even seen to think giving what the players want will too early affect the bottom line down the road.
All this contributes to a fall into mediocrity.
But thats the wrong way about going on patreon...
You should (or at least i do) support those projects you like and the DEV says it would be. I ahve explicit expectations than, and if a DEV cant deliver them, i just cancel the sup... (and in those expectations the development time is falling too of course)
To sup a project that doesnt have sex in it, and never was about sex (explicit told by the DEV early on) and than complain about it... is just... meh.
As DEV than to try deliver on that part is dumb too i guess... stick to your plan, if you cant or dont have plan... well... thats meh too.
But Hillside have a good amount of patrons... the numbers were growing and growing. And as i recall it, the complains on the page wasnt about lack of lewd content... more like not satisfied with the overall progress storywise and some serious plotholes lately. Most people who were complaining got the impression that Darkblue pretty much winged the whole thing the last 3-4 episodes or did it from the beginning, and didnt have a complete plan for the story and how he wanted to end the thing...
For me it was more about the problem i saw that he isnt into the work anymore and tried to bite off more than he can chew before that and i got the feeling he doesnt know how to deal with branching. And branching was becoming an issue only now in the last 3-4 episodes, not before. Although i noticed he got distraced by many things he wanted to do but couldnt do it. Like Animations... he was already dead set on it to do animations... he made a poll about a year ago to see if many patrons wanted to have animations. That was one of a very few times where i said something. That i dont think it would be a good idead to deal with those if youre a not familiar with doing animations. Of course you can learn those things from scratch (he wanted to do so) but its really not easy and needs an HUGE amount of time and hardware power too. At that point i began to think that Darkblue wanted to deliver something "bigger" with big animations, over the top looking renders and such... Of course, if you see games like... from Phillygames, DrPinkcake or Oceanlab... i can understand that you want to deliver something like that too. But dont bite more off than you can chew (to quote me from earlier). And i think Darkblue did just that... he wanted to try it, saw he cant do it, and to me... i think that was a breaking point. The timing would fit too... he "lost" his passion about that time too where he considered to bring in animations and wanted to put higher quality renders out in general. Never did that though.
To me the renders are more than fine, and i never needed animations. 99% of the games with animations just do short loops with weird speed too... they are more annoying than enjoyable. There are some games with incredible animations... most of them are only about them though, animated fap scenes, well for those, i can watch porn. Games that can deliver in writing, good characters, give you some immersion AND awesome animations? Well i couldnt count more than maybe 10 games on this site who can deliver in everything in high quality. And those take really much time for an update too. But yeah... to achive that you have to reach for the very top, if you try and have to be honest with yourself that you cant do that... maybe that can cause a break in passion.
This could be an explanation too why Darkblue lost it during the ride...
Of course i dont know. Nobody does except him.
Losing passion for something is a complete natural thing though. we all did at some point with different things. To admit it and move on is not that easy for most people... especially if money is on the plate too.
I think Darkblue is dealing with it the right way. Admit it that he doesnt want to work at least for some time on the project, and will see how he is going from there. sometimes you can explain to yourself why you dont want to do some things not anymore.
