I don't agree with this sentiment when it comes to handdrawn images. Illusion games sure but anything hand drawn or Daz created has been released every 2 months or more now. It is a lot more time consuming to produce. Either due to Daz long render times on med to low end comps and hand drawing images takes a lot of work on the artist. Also, the quality of content has been a LOT more since then. before you were lucky if you got a few scenes for one character. Now its 3 to full completion. That is definately and improvement overall.
I never remember this game being more than a Open Sandbox VN, and I've been playing since we only had batgirl, huntress, and canary and not even the meta bordello. I don't really know where Ixiah is coming from on that one.
The art isn't the problem. Writing a scene might take a few hours of coding followed by an hour of debugging, but writing a dozen scenes could easily take weeks of debugging because (a) the interactions are far more complex, (b) the changes are less fresh in your mind, and (c) the fixes will have to involve altering more (new) code. That's just the nature of all programming that is more sophisticated than purely linear content addition.
Compounding this, you have an amateur programmer with a poor methodology (everything is flags) using an inadequate framework (fungus); that means change are more difficult than they should be and you're going to have a lot of bugs. The laws of software engineering tell us that as this project grows the percentage of work time that SR7 spends drawing is dropping as the programming and debugging become more difficult.
"Release early/Release often" does mean more overhead in the form of creating software releases, but on a nontrivial project you more than make up for that by getting your testing (and therefore debugging) coming in a steady flow of issues with recent changes instead of occasional tidal waves of problems with something you did two months ago.
For the record, the Gunsmoke Games guys did recognize this problem and tried to take the correct action: They hired a professional coder so that SR7 could focus on what he does well (draw and write dialogue). Unfortunately that didn't work out for various reasons-- I have my opinions on the root causes of that one, but suffice to say that I personally wouldn't want Smoke as my boss.
