I'm pretty sure devs mentioned that actual dev build contains way more content, that one w even patreon code, more like public has 1 solid bulk of the story, like act 1 out of 3 or something.
plus a story-driven indie rpg takes a lot time to make if you going for quality. Thought PFF hits like 8y in dev or smthng
We will[ be hitting 6 year but yeah it is a long time... only when you don't factor our team size into it and how much content is already in it. We might shoulda prolly should have put something smaller out, but I honestly can't say we could have gotten it out any faster than we did without twice the team and the factoring etc size.
It took a lot of work to develop the architecture changes for the game itself, and we are still developing some brand new featuresets and modules that just... do not exist. We are one of the first devs to put out some of the modules we have for unity. After we worked out a lot of our core tech things really sped up a lot. But yeah I can pretty confidently say we develop pretty fast all things in consideration because... hrmm, let me think on if I can say this publicly.
Well yeah I can, so basically we wanted to hire contractors to do a smaller game set briefly before Redic got into the city starring Aya, you've met her if you have played, she's the horned lizard girl hunting blackfurs. We hired four different contract based writers to do it, and we base most all of it off already existing locations and art to speed up the development speed, it was contracted for two years before I personally stepped in and for the past 2 years I put most my personal efforts towards taking the disparate documents and writing and fixing/unifying/updating them all to be more cohesive and completed a lot of the incomplete work.
In two years... GnS' full core story is written. It could ship in a couple weeks, even, in this state... it only took us two years to pullt his entire side-game together and finish it and some of it was slowed by a personal injury that slowed me down for a few months. Right now we are just polishing it and adding more to the experience based on input from Critical Bliss, who will be publsihing it.
Even if we weren't adding more to it, it was a FULL game, I would guess 10 hours, and now with all this side content? I think GnS could easily be a 15 hour game or longer if you just enjoy some of the side content we have for it. When I step back and I look at a lot of other projects, friends of mine even, I am pretty shocked how much we pushed.
GnS is valuable, too... its being used as a testbed for features, content delivery, what people enjoy and we need more of vs less, SEO building, and a host of stuff that GnS' existence lets us radically experiment without risking Avarice. The way our art pipeline, programming, and writing pipelines were vs how we have them now has improved a lot and yeah, super proud of what the entire team has accomplished. We haven't skipped a beat on releasing Avarice content, it's been super regular compared to the past when we had some pretty bad drought periods, and despite that we have essentially completed an entire test bed/game for it that will be out Soon.TM.
