I don't think most people realize the time involved in such a project, even with the outsourcing. She's likely putting in 60-70+ hour weeks
I really don't realise, just as many other players. So they think it's allright. But i know who can realise it - other working artists and coders.
So i asked few of cgi artists that i know - is it a good speed of drawing of like 50-80 pictures per mounth (or most times less pictures for noticably more than mounth), with all the same several characters... and they said that they would lost their job with a speed of light, if they would do that little for such a big ammount of time. And when i said that it's not actually a full quality drawings, but just colored tracings over a screenshoted pictures of real humans, they looked at me with a very strange way, like i was trying to tell that somebody actually do selling a pictures of 3 year old kids for a price of Mona Lisa or something like that )
So maybe the coding job do that labor so hard and long? Well, usually coders of something hard and big, like their own software - must find coding solutions for a series of very different task, to make their programm work properly and better then others in the end. But in renpy a coder don't have to find a brand new ways as an everyday challange. The structure of the game basic code is almost all the same: place character's pictures, place a text for output in a special area, portion by portion, and place triggers when to output the content picture on display. The most hard "tree of the story" code is strings like "if Dialog_Option1 then show picture1.jpg, else go next scene". It's actually primitive af and all the same blocks of code usually should be just copy-pasted with differs in text and pictures output.
So, when somebody telling me that it is a hard hard hard long long long job which requires so much time - i say yes, i believe, if that someone is a 5 year old kid - it's defenetly an achievement. But for a grownup, or even a group of grownups, it maybe not so good as it could and should be. Unless someone just wish to make "the development" as longer as possible. Why not? If patreons still pay per mounth, but not for all job's done )
why is still no weekly update ?
I am pretty sure that if the patreon will ever be so kind to change its policy from paying to developers not per time\update, but only will give money when all planed job completed and only if users are actually happy with it - then the same artists, coders, developers of any kind will show the miracles of job speed and users will get a fully completed games almost per every week )) Lazy asses and simulants will fall of from that market, but real professionals who actually can provide quality content really good and fast - will make all the gamers happy for about the same ammount of money, (but i am sure that even more people will wish to donate for a real job, quality and speed) which are now goes for milkers of da patreons, patreons who in most cases getting yet another portion of almost nothing trually interesting per updates for now )) imho. imho. imho ffs.
