If I turned it in a VN then all those hours that I have spent would have been pointless. There is no need for such a complicated arhitecture with quests, subquests, achievements, inventory, money system, job, mobile phone, computer, skills and so on for a VN, and beside I'm still working on Rejected No More, it's just that the updates will be slightly bigger and slightly less often, but my main focus for now is to make a game good enough to earn more patrons so I can do what I love, which is building games.
If I manage to do this full time then I can hire people to help me with both games.
But next week everybody will get to try the new game and decide if you like it. I'm sure that the people will, at least the people who supported me for No More Secrets. It's more or less the same type of game, but with better story and better graphics.
Look, I'll start by saying that I don't really have a horse on this race. I'm not philosophically opposed to sandbox-style games, but I do agree with the comments here that the majority of sandbox games in this site are just plain bad because devs here don't know how to develop a
game game (they often barely know how to structure proper english sentences), so anyone attempting this type of game shouldn't be surprised to see some reluctance. Additionally, I have just found out about this game from the "No More Money" thread, and I clicked here because I really, really liked "No More Secrets" and I thought that if you had made another game that I had missed, I owned myself to try it.
But more importantly here, what you need to do is be very aware of the
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, because it's clear from the post above you are falling for it. Yes, you invested a great amount of time developing these systems, but now it's time for you to look at what you have and evaluate "do any of these systems help the game tell the story I want to tell?" Because you have already spent those hours, and if these systems don't amount to something that makes the game better at a conceptual level, no amount of additional time invested will suddenly make them better, so it might be better for you to cut your losses, take what works (the story, the renders), and remove what doesn't (the sandbox mechanics).
Yes, it sucks, and it's never easy. But look at the development history of any major successful game, not just porn games here on F95, and you will see this happening
all the time. Entire segments that were basically complete got cut from Uncharted games because they were dragging the story down; Shadow of the Colossus had originally 48 colossi planned, then cut them to 24, and then scrapped another 8 because they weren't working; the original trailer for Bioshock Infinite shows an entire bridge sequence that was completely cut from the game; and the list goes on and on. And remember that while most people like to think of F95 releases as just a new chapter in a "live" game, this game is still in an alpha stage until you complete all chapters in the story. Alpha stage is exactly the right time to evaluate what works and what doesn't in the game.
So in short: if you believe in the story you wanted to tell here, then please keep working on it. I'm investing
my time writing this post because I like the characters and stories that you write, and I want to see more of it (I would also invest my money but I'm pretty broke). But don't try to force a sandbox mechanic into it just because you already invested your time in it. If it's not working, then just cut it out, painful as it may be — your game will be better for it.
We didn't play and enjoy No More Secrets because of the segments where we had to try to find which room in the house had the next step in the story, we did
despite of them, because they were a minor distraction from the game we loved. Please don't add a bigger distraction that serves no purpose when it comes to tell a good story.
