I understand the outrage. It is just there are a lot of pressure on my side. Releasing it as a demo and then keep adding stuffs could be a way, but it might not be the best in our case. If this game has no inspirations from other games then I think i might be safe to do so. But getting "inspired by NTRLegend" results in a very high expectations from players and also comparisons between these two games will be inevitable. When we release something that is worse than NTRLegend, maybe some ppl will understand us, but a large number of the rest will just say it is lame, and it is shitty. At least I have seen a lot of these comments before.
Initially, with the assumption that NTRLEGEND was not going to get updates any more(in 2021 Sep), it will not be hard to release something that is at a similar level of complexity. However, GB is back and he has made a huge update to his game(almost doubling the amount of contents),which results in more challenge and pressure on our side.
Without enough differentiations and good contents, it is very hard to release it. A lot of people on the internet will judge it is a copycat of our inspirator and they won't even care to listen to the whole story. Besides, a bad first impression will be very bad for a porn game. While large companies have a lot of resources for PR(you still hear about 2077 even it is very buggy at the beginning), we have very limited resources in PR(hardly you here about indie games who sucks their release unless it is very good). So if the initial release is messed up, ppl will just forget about it very quickly and end of story.
Lastly, as I spent more effort in the development, I also have a higher expectation in its quality myself. We did better than before in the design of Chiho's home and then naturally we want something even better in the hot spring ryoukan. It feels itchy if you have built something 80 marks/100 before and now you make something 70 marks/100. As a developer you really would want it to be 80-90 marks/100. It is just the nature of a developer.
Comparing to software engineering, which I have some experience with it myself, game development is more uncontrollable. It has more of an art perspective and a lot of tweak & twist is needed. For applications, you care about its functionality and for games you care about your experience and feeling. When it comes to a feeling, an experience, it becomes subjective and hard to measure and manage. Sometimes, I spent my whole day testing a few values and curves of a mini-game and think what player will like or dislike. In conclusion, imo game development is more like a research and software engineering in general is more like engineering.
I feel very bad and sorry for making things going late and behind the due. The game is functioning now and the biggest challenge for us now is the review from DLsite. If that goes smooth, things could be faster than expected.
