I'm still in the mindset that the .71b update didn't feel right. The writing seemed a bit off. I know there was speculation that maybe ICSTOR's girlfriend or someone did and that he was actually dead or whatever and she was collecting his money and all that kinda shit, but I mean, how much fucking drama can follow one developer around?
Yes there are games that have surpassed this over the years, and since this was my first VN and Caroline my first girl, I have some oddball screwy misguided loyalty to the dude even though I never pledged him.
Makes me think I'm just as fucked up as he is.
If memory serves, the only items ICSTOR was responsible for in Milfy City over the last few updates was the basic story and the renders; once he was done with those he sent them off to his team to compose dialogue and code the actual game. It's possible he had to find someone new on short notice to do the dialogue for .71b since it was infamously rushed to satisfy the outcry over his first Abandoned tag, or maybe he tried to do it again by himself and just didn't give a shit. It really speaks to just how low the bar was for him to successfully complete this game and he still fucked it up.
I'm of the belief that his issues stem more from depression, dissatisfaction, and perfectionism rather than laziness or any of the various conspiracy theories involving dead devs, money laundering, or organized crime. Anyone who's had to work on a large creation (like my fucking thesis fuck that) has fallen into this trap at some point:
1. Sit down to work on thing.
2. Work on thing for a while.
3. Realize everything you did sucks.
4. Panic over number of remaining things to do and your current state of suckitude.
5. Hate-delete most of what you did and go play vidya games/surf the web/jerk off to calm down and regroup.
6. Repeat.
At some point the mere stress of even sitting down to work becomes overwhelming because you know you're in for 8 hours of pain where nothing gets done. You cut back on your hours and work on other things to keep your focus. You set ambitious deadlines for yourself as motivation, not realizing that missing them will cause even more stress. You find yourself coming up with excuses to anyone who'll listen.
It sucks, and a small part of me feels for him.
And it still doesn't excuse him for shit! All he had to do to was farm out the renders and he'd have achieved the dream of counting his money while everyone else did all the actual work. He could be making double what he is now and been running a full-on adult game studio pumping out multiple games at once, like NLT or MrDots. But that's the bed he's made, so we instead get to have our jollies instead laughing at his simp patrons and lamenting the game that could have been.