I appreciate you supporting the creator. It really goes a long way for us.
And yeah, game might be a bit painful but hopefully OP will take the good criticism in stride for his next one. Sometimes it's just not worth it to restart the whole game at this point. Still? I believe the work he does is deserving of more support.
I would love to do the reworks required to fix many of the issues, but the time required would be insane and much of it is really core issues in the design I started with anyway.
At the core I wanted there to be a grounded life simulation. There's really no game that does this, primarily because it can be annoying as hell to simulate waking up, brushing your teeth, going to work/school, walking/driving home, making dinner, etc etc.)
But at the same time, without some layer of grounding and routine the world becomes just another action/adventure simulator. Even games like rune factory that try to blend them generally end up leaning too much into the action game part to me ( and I have 300 hours in rune factory 4!)
I have been trying to reduce pain points(compare v0.15 maps to v0.25+), but there comes a point where further condensing and tweaks will start to strip away a lot of what makes the world feel more living.
I'll still try to improve things but it's not easy to do when even changing a single map takes hours. I can't just mess around with them unless I can identify specific pain points that need to be fixed, and are also important enough to delay new content for.
The same goes with most systems in the game. I feel like the core gameplay loop can and should be broken at some point(perhaps some sort of graduation?) but the game isn't currently in a state that can support that. It needs a lot more attention to the combat side of the game first before I can let the player properly ignore the lifesim aspect at the core of the game.
And that's one of the main issues with the game as well, the complete lack of direction and flow. I set our to make a sandbox rpg but there's no point. Even breath of the wild had a route to follow for a main story!
That core route is my main focus right now, but work hasn't been kind enough to let me get enough hours in to do both that and artwork and hit up some of the core issues like redoing the stats screen. I have to make some executive choices on what I can get done in my limited time.
Perhaps if I had infinite time and resources I could get things done faster, but unfortunately I'm just a random guy with a dayjob and family that spends his weekends developing games.
