- Aug 24, 2022
- 250
- 648
Just to be clear, I didn't mean to insinuate you are lazy or 'scamming'. I think my reservations / concerns come exactly from what you said here.The "problem" is that I invest stupid amounts of time in dialogue, expressions, and auxiliary animations that people don't even notice. And that's expensive.
In my opinion (which again.. nobody asked for..!!)
It would probably be worthwhile to start investing in the story / playable content of the game. You've already made huge strides / efforts to setup a functioning day-loop with modular characters that can be dynamically generated and several scene backdrops.
From my perspective, you have all the assets and mechanics in place to start pumping out more story driven content and you have a real talent for writing it - IMO.
I'm probably not saying anything you don't know, you already said it yourself perfectly.
It just feels like there's a huge diminishing return on features like this:
Do you think most players would care / notice dynamic heights?Sum to that the additional engine features I've needed to add to make the madness of variable height characters putting their hands in the right place, and the automation of 80 layers sorting themselves without manual commands... and yeah, you get three months of development for an update.
Sinking months into a technology that has to account for differing heights on characters and offsetting your inverse kinematic interactions between characters.. that's months of effort & testing & fidgeting & adjusting workflows to support - for no foreseeable benefit other than some characters are a few pixels taller.
I'd trade that for more story, locations to visit, unique events seeded into a daily routine, etc. I think if you put out a poll just to your patrons, ignoring us freeloaders, I would guess if the choice was between story content past day 6, or dynamic character height - I think I could guess which one would win.
Ultimately the decision is yours but if your goal is to maximize a ROI from patrons who want to come along with you on this journey, I think you have to account for their user experience too.
TL;DR - I agree with you 100% but I wouldn't put "problem" in quotes. Time is your most valuable resource and where you invest it matters.
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Appreciate your time in responding, I really only bother to write any of this because I see such an amazing game here and someone with serious attention to detail and quality gates around their development process.
Wishing you good luck and tons of success.