Sunset: "If you think I'm gonna release SU on a deadline, you're living in a dream world!"
Us: "Good. Deadlines save us. Deadlines lift us up and transform our projects into something better. And on my soul, I swear that until my dream of a world where deadlines, transparency and bugfreeness are the reality we all share, I'll never stop pirating. Ever."
Seriously though, deadlines are a good thing that increase productivity. We do out best work under a reasonable amount of pressure, and deadlines provide that pressure.
Having a monthly schedule is good since you have a lot of room to create something, but the span is short enough to keep yourself focused on one specific element of the game and not drift away doing other things.
Moving to bi-monthly builds is a step in the wrong direction. It's fine to do once if you're doing a huge update and don't want to spend time cutting it in two and making sure both halves work.
But you're not increasing productivity. You're not gonna get 200% content, you'll get 175% at best. Since the deadline is so far away, you're gonna procrastinate, you're gonna lose focus and waste time polishing non-critical things, and then when you're nearing the deadline you're going to be under unnecessarily high pressure when you realize that people are now expecting 200% content compared to a monthly build.
If you're making an actual video game you do need a lot of time, in order to experiment and try to find something new that's working and is fun to play. But the "games" we're talking about on this site are really visual novels, consisting of some barebones mechanic (which is perfectly fine) with writing and artwork added on top of that. There is absolutely no reason to extend the build schedules for months.
You're not creating the Mona Lisa or David. You're drawing two people fucking and writing text describing it, you should be able to produce one such artwork weekly. If you do three a month, that leaves one week for polish and implementing it into the game. Shave off the quality of a drawing slightly and take one day to test the build, and you have it all done in a month.
Doing release windows on top of this is of course, as has been shown, a laughable concept. Extending the deadline is not going to help, it's just making things worse. You can dedicate a whole year to make a build, but you know that after 365 days you're gonna be sitting on an unfinished, unstructured mess that is months away from being releasable.
What is weird is how many patrons seem to be OK with paying them money every month, but only getting something every 2 months (with an extra 2 week delay added on top of that).
I stopped supporting their Patreon after some lackluster, buggy update a couple of years ago, and in hindsight it seems like a ridiculous thing to complain about in comparison. I mean, at least I got something that month!
Now this rant has nothing to do with Sunset's art (which is still godly), his writing (which are good takes on every character that makes them stand out from each other), or the fact that the amount of girls increased to unmanagable levels. It's all about productivity, and how they, if they still aim to finish the remaining girls within 5 years, need to turn up the heat and impose deadlines instead of cooling down by pushing the deadline ever further away.
Body blessed by the gods. Those tits will never sag!
