well personally i just hope this game will continue
I mean, I do too. Just like, at a speed that might be indictive of someone spending 40 hours a week working on it. Because that's supposedly what this is. This is Inno's full time job.
I'd also like her to stop lying, but lets be realistic here.
Look, I'm not subscribed to this game and after playing it I think it's pretty decent - so just wanted to offer my perspective as someone who's fairly neutral and been messing around with my own coding projects and H-Games.
I feel whatever you think about Inno, the basic reason that they make so much money for slow progress is that games like CoC, TiTs, LT with text driven transformation and complex sex combat systems are very popular and not very easy to code. So, anyone who puts the time in to create the basic system can work at whatever pace they want and people will still pay due to the shortage of content in general.
If these games were easy to make they would be everywhere, since they are profitable. I can say from implementing several features like LT's in my own game (link in sig.), that it's taken months of coding and more than 50 plugins to (in my case) extend RPG Maker to have a basic grapple sex system, time-based NPC systems, rough vs. consenting stance system, and stress-based game over rape system.
Things like transformation, large numbers of persistent NPCs and encounters, a complex inventory and looting system, accessible fetish preference system that is massively configurable and serves you the content you want, pregnancy, clothing and body states, dynamic character information screens - all of these are either infeasible or a long way down the roadmap.
In addition, Patreon and other subscription systems take a huge chunk of your earnings - so Inno's 7k is probably more like 4k. So with respect, people saying that Inno did 3 weeks of coding and is now just raking in the cash are not correct.
If you think what I'm saying above is wrong and you know a way to make one of these systems yourself easily - I genuinely invite you to do that. I enjoy these games a lot and there isn't enough content. Or...better yet, come code for me lol.
Again, not taking a side or saying people can't be frustrated. Just adding some perspective as someone who is trying to code this type of thing myself.
So first, no, these games are not hard to code or design. We've literally been building text adventure games for 40+ years now. Most of them ran better, on way worse hardware, all while doing more than LT manages. Fuck, I wrote my first text adventure game before half the people in this thread were probably born. With less than 100 hours on my current project I have a prototype engine that can handle basically everything in LT worth ripping off. Like, if LT's content was in a format that didn't suck and could easily be parsed out and converted to another format, I could probably lift it wholesale (I'm not doing it by hand). The only part that wouldn't work in my engine as it is now is the leveling and perk systems, because they're horribly designed and why would anyone want to copy them, and LT's casino games which are boring and I've already done better versions of (although my poker AI is legit
too hard. I can't beat it. Although I'm not, admittedly, amazing at texas holdem)
I'm not going to do that though, because I'm way more interested in making an interesting sim sandbox than straight copying LT. Plus that wouldn't be challenging or interesting in the slightest. But there's *lots* of engines that could do the same, doubly so considering how poorly LT runs. Finding an engine for a text adventure game isn't the hard part.
The hard part is writing content.
And you need a good amount of content to draw in an audience to begin with. But as has been proven over and over, once you're there community oriented games manage to progress quickly IF they're easy to write for. If LT was well designed, we'd be getting content of varying quality constantly. The fan base is large enough that if it was easy to create, people would create it. There's been like 50 of us in this thread alone talking about this.
Which brings us to my second point. Critical mass is more important to making money than anything else. Everyone plays CoC2/TiTS, so they make the most money. And everyone plays those games because they're the most popular. They're the most popular
because they're the most well known. I've played like 80 different text-based hgames over the last six months, and the fact that you're acting like there aren't a ton of them just proves this point.
These games
are easy to make. And they
are everywhere.
And before you try and say they're not, see point number two.
LT is as successful as it is because of a combination of two things. First, timing. It blew up when there was a lot of movement between projects. Devs and players both were switching between games quiet a bit at the time, so it was a good opening for a new game to slip in. And second, reusable content making the game look larger than it is. But now it has critical mass. Inno can release milestone updates that contain not a single one of the milestone features and people will eat that shit up. The ball is already rolling.
