Though I also do hate the “hey there’s going to be a delay and another and another” thing, I think we at least have to give credit to Innoxia where credits are due because Inno isn’t actually just wasting time doing nothing.
From 0.3.20 to 0.4, it took Inno ~1.5 months to develop. I decided to flip through the Github history page out of boredom, and between these two versions, there were 347 changed files with 19,664 additions and 2,638 deletions, meaning 19,664 new lines of code and 2,638 deleted ones (according to Github).
Around 20000 lines of code within 90 days is around 222 lines of code per day.
Now, I barely understand Java, and I don’t know how much code actually translates to content, but just hear me out here.
Obviously, things like items have specific formats, they could be copied & pasted. Though “copy & paste & change variables” still take time, maybe not so much thinking, sure, but repetitive work is still work. Think of gradient colors, for example. It’s not like there’s some magic function that's like “Woosh! Now, these colors suddenly blend appealingly.”
But besides those, other content is also being made. For instance, an entirely new file named “AbstractEncounter” with around 350 lines(excluding imports and spaces). It holds functions for (what I believe) to be the more “special” encounters, like “Enforcers” and "SlaveWantingToUseYouInDominion”.
Searching for the word “Elis”, 155 files could be found; searching for “Fields”, 152. This means there were around 300 files that were changed (a little less counting the repeated names in paths) relating to the new world map if we only counted Foloi and Elis.
You also have to consider what designing a game like this actually ensues besides coding. Excluding contributions, Inno, being the only dev, has to write the story, the sex scenes, the flavor text of all the items, tiles, the dialogues of encounters whether sexual or not, character descriptions… And you can’t just pop these out of thin air, you have to come up with them first.
And that’s just the “writing” part. What about debugging, which can take days or even weeks before you can even identify what’s causing it? What about developing and implementing the mechanics? What about improving existing features? What about modding support? Don’t forget that Inno is writing on plain Java from the ground up, meaning she also has to write the entire engine the game runs on.
To sum it up, I think work IS being done. Maybe the development focus is questionable, maybe Inno not hiring other programmers to help is dumb, insert some other good arguments or questions here that I can’t think of right now.
What I do know though, is Inno is definitely not a lazy potato sitting on a couch doing nothing all day. She may be spending tons and tons of time staring at the screen, though we just can’t be sure because we don’t have a spy camera on her.
So I think we can at least be a little less harsh on her. Words do hurt. And when you’re working hard but people don’t believe you and explanations would be too technical to understand, I think this can quickly burn someone out.
She has flaws, yes, I’m not saying we have to be the nicest people to her for missing deadlines after deadlines, but we don’t have to absolutely trash on her with words either. Even refraining just a tiny bit can help sometimes.
