View attachment 3140742
You are correct in the assessment that the actual update schedule is... inconsistent. This is the scenes added per update. I suppose as with art, the most work is done in a burst of inspiration.
It may be disingenuous for me to say that the trend was 'clear'. Of course, for this style of graph, keeping a line anywhere above 0 is pretty much a win, I suppose.
I considered going by story events, but decided against it, since they were far more sparse, and I'd have fewer data points to work with. However, I suppose if we are tracking the development of the game, the story additions are what we should track.
That being said, they're less easy to quantify. I can clearly quantify HCGs, but story is... I guess I count by quests, but the content of individual quests is varied. Not that I quantified HCGs.
I wonder if I could get a few of you guys to do me some volunteer work, download every version and help me populate my data so I can track Technobrake's seasonal trends over this 4 year period.
As far as data I'd want from each version, it'd be 'date of release', 'number of main quests', 'number of side quests', 'number of events', 'number of H events', 'number of H CG'. 'number of NPCs', 'amount of dialogue'. This would let me kind of pick his brain for whatever part of his game he's focused on doing at that particular point in time. I don't think that Technobrake works on all aspects of his game evenly, and that he might just be really into doing one thing or another at a point in time.
I do think he wants to 'do' this project, I just don't think he's entirely sure what that entails. He has regular polls about what people want to see, and then adds that to his work. I think he's probably got a story in mind, since he never asks about that, but on the art side, he wants to know what people want to see. As seen in the work around Potion Maker and Yarizo, the HCGs are an everything thing, but the story is his own.
That being said, as a casual writer myself, I can probably understand the slow story. He's not satisfied with how it's written. Given that he's selling this as a product and it's part of an interactive video game with potentially multiple endings, it's probably subject to much greater issues of self-criticism than the average casual story.
I don't have the raw data, so I don't have a trendline to draw, but I'd say that this game will take probably 5+ years to come out in full. I'd say the biggest source of uncertainty is Iris. Iris getting her own whole sidestory in a city with a dungeon, with her own combat system and her own villains to fight is a source of concern at the moment. Jimmy and Kohaku's quest seems to be about halfway done. They're 3 star adventurers just about and there's 6 total quest tiers. The final quests may vary a bit in complexity, but I don't imagine they'd be much more. If it was just Jimmy and Kohaku, I'd imagine at most, the final bosses might take a bit of tuning to make them satisfying to fight. Or perhaps just fuck it, they have high health and erotic attacks out the wahzoo and you just need to grind. Either way, I feel like that would take 5 years to do, given how long it's taken to get here.
Iris having her own storyline... I have no clue how long her storyline will last, and given that she has one, I can't say it's impossible for other characters to also. Admittedly, Iris is fairly special. She and Leon are somewhat deuteragonists, existing since the first version, and also, her own story probably doesn't have a well structured star ranking system for quests since she's already a 5 star adventurer. She may well be the only case, and her story may be over and dealt with within a year.
But I can't see the future. I can just draw on the past to try and draw lines into the future. If something bad happens, if something good happens, I can't account for that. I'm no actuary. All said, whatever happens to this game, it's gonna have something like 600+ scenes in it, so buckle up folks.
