Im gonna say what I said when I first found this game. Its an ambitious project. I hope you guys can get to a point where graphics and general gameplay are smooth and stable enough so you can focus on the plot and get out updates in a timely manner.
It looks very promising but I personally have to see more before I consider supporting.
The last time I played this game it was just one floor on a dungeon and I couldn't leave or do anything else but fight a couple of enemies in there and get 1 or 2 animations. The gameplay also was very clunky and buggy back then. But it has been a while since I tried it. Probably more than 3 months.
Hmm, there was a locked door and you need to get through a puzzle to leave that room. But the current public version is still the dungeon, although the combat improved a lot since the first time we released.
We have been releasing some stuff of the open world to our patrons for the last two months and we will have it on a public release at the end of next month. There won't be more than two or three quests yet, but you will be able to see that we improved A LOT the way we manage armours, the way the combat flows, we are improving the lipsync at this very moment, and also, there will be some cutscenes + dialogues explaining more of the plot. The plan is to finish those starting story hooks until half of the October and then focus November and December on further refinements + implementations of new quests. So we are very close to reaching the point you described as having everything stable enough to then just focus on the story.
We have a team of 7 people working on the game + voice actors and actresses and we are doing the best we can to manage the budget with freelancers to add VFX and things of the sort. What slows down our process is that making a game with the quality we aim to achieve is expansive. To give you an idea: A character designer can cost 1000 dollars, the voice acting is 20 dollars per 100 words and there can be quests with over 3000 words. New armours usually cost 400 or 500 dollars to have a male and female version. If you put in perspective all we have to do in terms of programming, animating, modelling, level design and writing, you see that our current budget is still the greatest barrier to cross.
So with this MVP of the RPG side of the game being released at the end of next month to the public, we hope to show people a better version of what our game is about and to show that we are seriously and continuously working hard, doing our best to manage at least the more realistic expectations.
=)
There are some screenshots of the world we are planning to do
You must be registered to see the links
if you want to learn more about the steps we want to take while we expand the explorable area.