Well... mkey. If you can afford this luxury of doing what you love for a long time without losing creative/resource steam... that's pretty rare and hard to relate to. I thought the revenue is essential to keep you going and I really REALLY want for you to keep going.A whole lot to unpack there, and I'm convinced it comes from a good place, but like some pointed out, a lot of it isn't really applicable. I've got a long, long career in software projects as well, first doing them, and then running them, and I'm quite aware a lot of the stuff I'm doing with LomL makes absolutely no business sense.
But I'm not running this a business, and besides working more than fulltime on LomL (if doing anything so much fun can be called working) I have a second job that I rely on to pay the bills and provide for my family. So I'm really free in a way no person in this for the business could be, to set goals that focus purely on the creative process, which are the parts that give me joy.
So when I say "if support collapses, it collapses", it's not the defiant cry of a harried captain howling against the wind as his ship slowly disintegrates around him in the storm that threatens to swallow him whole, but rather the assurance that I'll do what I feel will benefit the quality of the game best, regardless of business concerns. Because all of this talk of release dates is only relevant right here and now, but it's completely meaningless the moment this chapter is completed (or at some point in the future, this game). And that end result is what matters to me, not the process.
NGL, that made me snort coffee all over my keyboard.
Cheers to all that responded in support, it's good to know you get where I'm coming from.
I've also done software for decades but in corporate envs, nothing artistic. In my experience business matters are not the only reasons why it's worth keeping in touch with your audience by releasing more often. More than once in my career I found myself putting in a lot of work in some groundbreaking/experimental project for more than a year, only to find out at the end that even though I kept getting good signals along the way from immediate sponsors, the result was no longer received at large with the same enthusiasm as back when the POC/MVP was presented simply because the general focus of attention changed a lot in the mean time. The problem had nothing to do with the quality of my work or the result not being true to the vision, it was timing. I'm telling you it was highly demotivating beyond pecuniary reasons and I think this trap is applicable to many artistic projects too. In the end, all artists want their art to "steal" attention and have a solid audience and when you touch base so rarely it unavoidably increases this risk of disconnect => disappointment. I know there are "mad"/solitary artists/scientists who have no issue working in their "cave" for years, some of them get their names in history books but a vast majority don't. Frankly I don't know too many who do it just for their own pleasure, maybe it's logical that we don't hear much from them.
Anyway, I hope your project is fulfilling for you but also that it gets successful at large while also being ever more pervier and kinkier. I hate vanilla/policed fantasies with a vengeance. I'm out.
