I'm kind of amazed that nobody took the concept and made a copy of the game before it even got out.
and I must say that i'm starting to believe that if someone started now,he could pull it off before the original goes live.
is there some sort of copyright that prevent other people from doing it?
Its because there's legit no chance of that happening. Japanese coders are horrifically fucking bad at coding on the PC platform. Like worse than your typical western amateur fresh out of high school.
Go pickup any VN from the mid-2000s. It'll run an i9 and somehow even an RTX 2000s series card into overdrive because the memory leaks are so fucking bad. Even the AAA Japanese companies are bad at the PC platform and rarely make PC ports. And when they do, they always suck. Capcom and Idea Factory are the only Japanese companies that take PC seriously and actually learn how to code for them.
It's why most of them just use RPG Maker, SRPG Maker, or other such engines instead of learning to code. Makura is one of the few coders there who, while he still has issues with optimization and bugfixing, is capable of doing shit with his games the code was never meant for.
This eroge is in the KiriKiri Engine, which was only ever designed to scroll text, display boxes, display standing pictures/CGs, have interact-able buttons, and play sound files. There's nothing in its code to do more than that. And this unhinged madman pulled off miracle code to get that engine to run a fucking blobber. Which is a genre so obscure its nearly dead as it is. This whole game is a venn diagram of several different things, each as rare as a unicorn, layering on top of each other. And it somehow doesn't set your computer on fire like most VNs would despite all the custom code.
This dude is almost certainly the only one in the whole eroge industry of Japan that would even attempt this. Let alone be able to pull it off.
And even if there was a second person who tried it, it would still probably take them about as much time. Remember how I mentioned Kaga Shouzou in an earlier post? Creator of Fire Emblem. Seasoned, genre-defining pro with 40 years of experience. He's been a one-man-team for the last 25 years and a pace of roughly 6-8 years between his releases.
This game having a pace of 5 years is actually rather fast for a one-man-team on that side of the Pacific. People are getting frustrated at Makura not because of "slow-pacing." No, for a one-man-team, he's actually got pretty good pacing. It's people just not having perspective on this, and also him repeatedly setting deadlines and then missing them.
This isn't one of those usual scam games over here where its just a bunch of text with minimal gameplay or little to no custom code in Java, or a Ren'Py game with Koikatsu art assets. Those really have little reason to not be done in a year or two since there's next to nothing happening under the hood with little to no overhead for asset creation. (Because text-only or Koikatsu.) It's all just script writing and then mild code tedium. Yet somehow the development keeps going with a funded Patreon for 12 years.
Honestly, Makura seems like something of a perfectionist because he keeps going back and adding shit. Which is the real thing that causes the delays. However, if he wasn't a perfectionist, he probably wouldn't be able to pull off a cosmic-level rarity of game development like this in the first place. I've begun to think its just a the natural downside of what allows him to do this at all.
I
still think the man needs a manager, or assistant, or
something to help keep him focused and on track, though.
