- Dec 4, 2017
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But that's the thing. This part of GGGB happened thanks to Eva's ambitious desire to push herself. Not to meet deadlines but to make the best adult VN / RPG possible where no playthrough could be exactly the same, and each player could have their own experience. That's a lot of work, and if you remember correctly Eva had to take 3 - 4 months to develop all the endings. Armed with that hindsight knowledge, if Eva decided to go for the speed, there won't be such complex branches in the plots anymore, because the goal is monthly releases, so you just develop a game with minimal barebones branching that you could craft the complete endings for in just 1 - 2 months tops.It is a great game, i'm still discovering new scenes in it till this day it's mind blowing.
When efficiency is the only goal, that's how art becomes junk food. If you think about current Marvel projects for example, it's the perfect example of minimal effort to produce a constant stream of entertainment that lacks original ideas. Sure, people have loved it for a time, but with Phase 4 it's obvious the market got oversaturated and people are feeling sick from having to consume so many same-y movies or shows about nothing in particular.
That's what burnout is. Your brain is not a machine, you can't make it work faster than it can, especially in a creative line of work that requires a lot of thinking over ideas. When your mind allocates 40% of its power to stressing about making it on time, you're only working with 60% efficiency while simultaneously draining your willpower which eventually stops working and you just want to spend the entire day in bed not doing anything, and that mental state is extremely hard to get out of. Think of it as jog vs sprinting. You can run long distance jogging but you can't run the same distance at full speed, you'll just gas out or pass out.Do you try to say that working 8h leads to you not working at all ?!? That makes no sense, unless you had something like this in mind
I don't think the money factor was the main motivator there. At the beginning, Eva was a nobody with no real income to rely on, but still worked hard to please the potential players. Positive feedback is the main driving force. You can't get feedback from money, it's just numbers. Your amount of patrons might grow but you can't really tell if they like what you do if you don't hear the positive feedback from people that love what you do. And the more people say how much they love what you do, the more you want to give them. But like with all dopamine sources, eventually you get used to it and it doesn't work as well anymore. And if some objective reasons get in the way of you receiving that positive feedback (amount of work, life getting in the way, personal emotional baggage etc), it's hard to motivate yourself to work as hard as you were before. And if your numbers get smaller on top, I don't know how it's supposed to give you a jump-start. For my ADHD brain, negative motivation just doesn't work. I'd rather take less money for punishment, feeling like I deserve it, than force myself to work at max speed. And for some reason I have a hunch that Eva might have a similar problem. I feel like her shame got the better of her so she wanted to release a half-complete update, but being the people pleaser, she decided to do what her paying fans wanted, even if it might not help with that feeling of shame.In her GGGB days, she had more trouble getting money when she was pumping out monthly updates than she does now.