Nah, this is probably the best time for it.
The game has found its voice, Selebus has settled into a flow for the pacing. While there will still be some quality improvements, the rate of improvement will slow down now that the big stuff has been settled, and it feels like we're coming to the end of Chapter 2, which means it'll also be a good time to pause the current story.
Waiting to the end presents a number of problems:
1) Interest in the revised beginning will drop dramatically once everyone knows how it ends.
2) If the creator hates that part of the game, it will just keep gnawing at him
3) Relevant details may be added in the revision that set up events in chapter 3, and stalling the revamp project might force a redraft of already outlined content.
4) The beginning in its current state sets false expectations for the level of sexual content in the game. The sooner that's fixed, the sooner the game does the proper job of setting expectations for new players.
I'm not so worried about interest in the revised beginning dropping considering we're looking at a game that will require replaying.
Sure, it will gnaw at him until he gets it done, but so will the next time this happens because, as it is now, the game will continue to improve until the very end and older content will once again need to be revised to meet the standard of new content. The game has NOT plateaued in quality, which is what I'm suggesting waiting for, but I just don't see a plateau happening any time before the end. In general, that's a good thing, but not so much with this situation because that lack of quality plateau will cause this to just happen again in the future.
That third point is a valid concern, but this same redraft is likely to happen in reverse as outlined in the previous section. He will continually end up having to redo content that went untouched in previous revisions as quality increases further and he may even need to touch the revised sections because of this as well.
The fourth is even more valid and is my main reason for agreeing this rework does eventually need to happen. This may be a contributing factor in why people are expecting more sex content than they are getting. Yes, the majority of that expectation here is due to a certain false notion of the nature of the site, but some of the events do sort of rush things. Yes, this includes the same Ayane scene that gives us a little peek at the real Ayane instead of the facade we came to know at first once we learn it actually is a facade. The same can be said of a bunch of the early scenes that do rush things, they all set up the characters quite nicely and, with the correct amount of progress being made after that, can become the first signs in the game that a character is a certain way like Ayane's facade or Ami's trauma.
You say that nearing the end of chapter 2 will slow down quality increase, but that's not necessarily true seeing as chapter 2 is nowhere near the end of the game.
You think? I've felt that Selebus kinda already hit a wall and the game's gonna stay at the current-level (uber-high) quality.
I mean, the images/animations have been consistently beautiful for a koikatsu game. His plot and writing rivals some of the best Japanese visual novels I've read. Sure, some updates are better than others, but Selebus would naturally have his ups and downs considering he's human.
So I feel that once Selebus reworks his game once, it won't need further reworks. Again, this is just my opinion and I don't mean to criticize you
Yes, I fully believe that this game has not stopped improving not to mention the old adage about what practice does. As they say "practice makes perfect," which, while not entirely true at face value, that does apply here. With every scene he writes, he will improve bit by bit and, given how much longer the game has for development yet, he's going to get in A LOT of practice. With this practice will come further quality increases that, I fear, will just end Selebus right back in the beginning of a cycle that only the end of development can break because only the end of development will be a point where he doesn't keep improving during this game's development. Yes, he will again improve bit by bit in his next game, assuming he goes into a new one, but at that point it is of no consequence to this project.
What VNs have you played that have similar writing quality to LiL? I've always felt like it was leaps and bounds ahead of anything I've played as far as dialogue goes and how human the characters feel. I had thought part of that might be that some writing quality just gets lost when you translate things to english. If there are games out there with writing on par with LiL, I'd love to play them.
1)
Originial Grisaia series (Caution: Lots of horror/LSD-infused nightmare material. Makes LiL happy scenes look tame in comparision)
2)
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(Kinda dark, but way less so that LiL. Made in English by English-speaking devs, so you can enjoy the original game
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Some of the Japanese ones, especially ones that have specifically been mentioned as inspirations for this game, are extremely high quality. The one mentioned by VNDB as an example of the Denpa genre is also extremely good, though I forgot the name since it has been a while since I've had to go back to that page.
EDIT: "Shizuku" by Leaf is the one in the VNDB example I mentioned, that one is extremely good.
Writing is a skill, and skills naturally improve with practice, so in a very technical sense, there will be improvement over time.
But that improvement is typically incremental. The big quality jumps happen when you figure out a character's voice, the narrative tone, the proper way to pace your action, etc, and for the most part all that has been done, so we shouldn't see any major quality leaps in the future.
That's exactly what I'm getting at, he's been improving pretty consistently even if slowly, but that all adds up over time and we still have multiple years to go. That's a long time to incrementally improve.
I'm just concerned this will end up a long term cycle that will lead to burn out in a way Selebus wasn't expecting and didn't prepare for like he did with the events per update.
