The text game isn't abandoned. Thanks a lot for the kind words regarding the project, I will detail below why I made the switch:
Regarding the text game, I made design mistakes in the beginning by overdeveloping content areas instead of focusing on a more cohesive main story plot. Instead of making it clear where the player needs to go, I've spent a lot of time developing content in areas that need a lot of clicking around to figure out whether there's content there or not.
I was writing a lot of text that was unfortunately hard to reach, and this couldn't really be fixed without starting over from the beginning. At the same time, I got a bit tired of describing everything (eg. "You walk through the dry desert, wearing your explorer hat as a first line of defense against the blinding light of the sun." (not the best example, but it's enough)) and there's a reason why 2D art are often more popular than text games, it doesn't take a lot of energy to imagine the environment when you can clearly see it.
The 2D game is a breath of fresh air compared to the monotonous routine of writing text and drawing scenes, with little in between except for design choices. At the same time, it helped me rethink why I started developing this game/universe and I arrived at the conclusions I've put down in a
You must be registered to see the links
.
Other than that, unity allows me to animate scenes. In the text game, the closest I could get would have been to buy live2d which was too expensive considering how much the project was earning in comparison. There's also more focus on character art in general, together with more expressive poses. There are other benefits, but it's difficult to lay them all out in one post.
Of course, I understand why your preference might lean towards the text game. Development on that isn't over, it's just done at a different pace, at least content-wise. Mechanics-wise, my ambitious ideas turned out to lead to plenty of bugs that are hard to settle as a solo dev so on that side the 2D game will get most of the attention because I have some interesting plans regarding the combat and the gameplay loop.
These weeks I'm preparing an update for the text game, I need to organize my schedule to fit in some art together with adding some scenes
Hargan2 wrote. Every new scene needs a bit of testing, because it's a bit more complicated than just copy pasting text. There's a lot of syntax to write when adding new scenes to make sure you don't have to scroll down a lot and easily lose track of what you were reading.
