why are these update too smal
Hey. There was a discussion on this at the tfgs forums in regards to this topic, so I figured I'd share it here too. The text in quotes is from other users of the TFGS forums.
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[The reduced size is] Likely due to covid some of the team doesn't have as much time or access.
This is pretty accurate. Half the team was sick this month, COVID or otherwise. Things this year have also had a pretty draining effect on my mental state, and I'd say the same for a lot of the team.
Gotta agree here. I understand, especially currently, that things are a bit crazy now, but the updates have been tiny for way longer than the current situation. I was happy when I saw a team would be picking this up again - and it seems like the team after only a month or two lost a lot of their steam, lost interest, and progress seems like it has crawled along ever since at a snails pace. Perhaps it's time to expand the team if it is currently not able to add anything more than two scenes in the game and some bug fixes on a per month basis?
Because of the delay in waiting to see if our previous project lead would return, we had a large amount of back-log content stored up for the first few releases. It likely made those first few releases over-large (and probably set unreasonable expectations for the size of our releases going forward). Our "scenes" tend to be between 3-5k words, and we have two dedicated authors, who tend to get one or two of them completed a month, depending on their size. I also do some writing, but have been forced to do more coding and editing than writing recently, much to my chagrin.
I had a couple of potential coders reach out to me over the past week, so I'll be talking to them soon. We have one coder who is primarily concerned with bug fixing, and I've been taking up the majority of the remaining coding. So, if one of these potential members can help with passage coding, that will be very helpful. Getting new coders into the workflow takes some time though, so it can take a couple of months to really see the effects.
What I really need is another editor to help with proofreading so that, in the event I am unable to get to things, they don't grind to a halt. That has been part of the reason for the slowdown as during the year which you've called out as I have either been working two jobs (not including PE), or have been dealing with the effects of the pandemic on my mental state.
The writers have written enough content to get us up to the ending for the trophy wife course (and the game's first ending) before the end of the year, and I'd like to take stock of things then. Restructure the team as best we can, and start talking about next steps forward (determining if we want to do another teacher sequence or move over to another path like guardian or therapist). It may be that the first release after that is code-focused, looking to address some specific limitations in our inventory system and do some refactoring in our code (especially in the newly added sections) before we strike out on another major addition to the game.
That would be understandable - if it was just the last few months that were lacking in any real content updates - but it's been like this for.. what, a year? More?
The past year has been spent primarily working on the new friend CD tasks and the trophy wife training.
Friend ended up assisting with 12 crossdressing tasks (all of which need 3 variants for) and significant reworking to the crossdressing progression which added some addtional main-line content (the stockings task, teacher requesting PC now wear flats to school, etc.). A ton of new clothing has been added through these scenes as well.
The trophy wife training has been one of our most complicated additions structurally since I took over, adding (at this point) 7 lessons that can be done in a semi-random order. Several of these focus on game-style mechanics rather than linear narrative, which requires a lot of additional coding time. It also added the dating task, which has six entirely different variants.
We also added a new store (mens wear), reworked the shoe store, two new cheer episodes (one of which has 5 very different variations), and reworked or added several smaller scenes (such as the Ashley masturbation scene and the crossdressing in the park scene).
All told, we added about 106,000 words worth of new content in the past year, which is roughly the length of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
Not like I warned people or anything. But yeah this is what happens when you end up with feature creep. The trello explains exactly what is wrong with PE.
Reign in the feature creep and things might start flowing smoothly again assuming people haven't lost complete interest in working on the game.
But yeah Trello tells me its a mess. If it were me I'd cut 75% of what is shown. There's too much 1 step forward 3 steps backwards going on.
Yeah. Addressing the trello is on my list of "things to do," which sadly gets longer every month. Hence why I'd like to sit back and cut some of the fat once the current teacher sequence is completed. Things like the phone UI have proven to be mostly unneeded (and are beyond the coding skills of most of the team atm). The trello has the unfortunate pleasure of having a lot of the "nice to have" items, and could do with some focus. Probably needs to be wiped out and restructured, as you said. I am not an experienced project manager (and said as much when I took over), and am continuing to learn things as we go forward.
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In the end, I'm not trying to make excuses, just offer some explanations as to why our later releases have been smaller. We appreciate everyone who supports us, but if you feel you're not getting your $5 a month worth, you are well within your rights to cancel your patronage. Though, we'd encourage you to resub if the updates return a size you are happy with. We will be continuing to work on the game, because in the end we still want to tell our story, even if it takes forever. We will also be making updates freely available on TFGS so you won't miss out on anything except the new avatar.
