Flashback to all my favourite fanfiction writers saying they will never abandon their stories, followed up by "Last Updated Mar 12, 2009"
The dev has been tweeting a bit in the last few months:
Dev tweets:
"No matter how much I think about Roshutsu, I just can't piece together an actual game together with it. It lacks so many mechanics which leaves me so little to work with."
"I've been circling back to Roshutsu, though I might do it as a top-down game instead. I still have the problem of not being sure what happens or what you do, but I keep trying at it."
He had this thing where he kept emphasizing that he was making a capital-G "Game" and not just a "porn", and so narrowed his concept to being a ENF walking sim. Seemed unwilling to add sex because it would taint the concept and turn it into another mere "porn" game. And while that's his perogative, what this also did was cut out most sexual things that he could use as mechanics in his not!porn game, which contributed to the issues that grinded development to a halt.
The flavour of exhibitionism this game has is the aforementioned "being nude in public and no one knowing" type, which then means that this is a minimalist stealth game. The levels should have been focused and curated towards introducing and layering the mechanics of the game, with the overall point of MC having to get from A to B while avoiding people as much as possible.
And while there is an entire world of stealth game and level design that would've helped with this, the game still remains fundamentally flawed by the creator's artistic constraints:
In stealth games, the player usually has a plethora of skills, gadgets, perks, etc to help them gather info, manipulate the AI, change and use the environment, and for general traversal across the map. By adhering so strictly to the "nude girl walking" concept, he left little room for any of the other cornerstones of stealth gameplay besides hiding or running away.
And of course, in stealth games, it's possible to get caught when stealth fails. Given that this is not a game where you can click on an alerted guard's head with a silenced pistol, he ultimately failed to decide on what would happen when detection happened. Since he didn't want anything remotely non-consensual, this also applied to likely consequences like getting your picture taken. I don't actually remember if we swayed him in the end, but a lot of the logical consequences of failing stealth just weren't part of what he wanted, and so that limited what could happen to artificial, gamey suggestions like "embarrassment bars filling up" and such. There was an attempt to fix this with the introduction of her friend, or a flashers forum, who would urge her onwards and make dares and challenges for her, but I guess that didn't do enough in the end.
Dev tweets:
"I want to make the ending of the game change based on the actions Rika does that night, where it shows a recap of events a la F:NV. The only bad end would really be if she gets arrested. In that vein, I need to come up with events that can happen during Rika's streaking night. I'm open to suggestions!"
"I'm going to open the door to sex in this new version of Roshutsu. Rika would build herself up to perform sexual acts in public if she streaks enough."
I have nearly everything I need to make a prototype of the new Roshutsu. I just need to put it all together now.
I always freeze up when I need to put a level together. This seems to be my recurring weak spot. Even for a simple 2D game, this is where I struggle most on. I don't have any level design process. Whenever I look at the tilesets or models I have, I struggle with piecing together what to do with them.
We'll see if this goes somewhere, but going by some of those tweets, I'm not entirely sure he's properly resolved the core issues his vision has.