- Mar 14, 2018
- 182
- 164
I feel like most of your problem here inescapbly lies with the patreon update model that's grown up.I've just played through the whole thing from the beginning to avoid compatibility issues. The last update was so long ago that I don't even remember what was already in it and what wasn't before the sauna scene. I understand your situation but I'm sorry, that changelog was clickbait. I expected an entirely new H-scene reading that.
Burying content like this is not nice. Not just because you've been away for so long, but because it usually fucks the code up and forces us to start from the beginning. I've dropped a ton of great ongoing games because of this and now you too just got me to replay a game that I already liked from the beginning for no good reason. I know, it was an update for the Patreon staff, but then don't get us all excited like that. :FeelsBadMan: Just release a "code change only" update next time, if you have to.
I prefer to not replay every game from the beginning every time something happens in them. That's kinda the charm of linear games. I just pop in every now and then to see what was added and then I move on. Updating old parts is a dick move, especially in a completely linear game where I am allowed to make mistkes and lock myself out of content by moving on with the main plot.
I wish you the best, just please don't do this again!
Linear story games of some fashion are easily the most common type to create. And of course, in general, you might only play them once when getting the full value out.
However since no adult game is mainstream and there are no mainstream funding sources for them, no developer can get a large upfront sum of cash, spend that cash slowly over 2 years fleshing out a game, then releasing the finished thing to the public to play through the entire finished story.
The independent funding model grows up from a lack of trust, the public don't just want to collectively throw a huge amount of money at developers they might not know, might not trust to finish a project, and can't form a strict contract with.
So they trade a trickle of money for a trickle of updates. If one stops, the other can also without any huge loss of investment.
And of course this doesn't work well for any linear story. If it only gets slowly updated over time, you only get to play new content at a trickle pace. It's like getting to watch a 12-episode TV series but you only get to watch the thing over a year or two, rather than in 12 weeks. And exascerbating that is the fact a game isn't a TV show, it's interactive, has extremely many working parts, and unless you design its framework perfectly from the start, you can't just "add on" content one bit after another a lot of the time, you've also got to integrate and change the game as a whole as its constructed, meaning compatibility breaks.
However if you don't like the trickle, you can always do the thing you'd normally do for mainstream content (that you're forced to): just be patient and wait the requisite year or 2 years for the project to be finished, and then play it when it's finished. If you choose to play the incomplete product, 1/4 through its production timeline, that's somewhat your own fault. Of course you'll have to suffer through trickles of updates afterwards.
It's utterly pointless blaming creators for this, until you/we can find a funding model that could give them a lump sum to finish their projects in private, and only release the finished game in public.