Dev's Patreon Update said:
But these updates take me around 3-4 months to make and I add more complexity and more animations each update. [snipped]
This is not also taking very long for you guys, but it is also taxing on me. These long development cycles make me feel like I am going nowhere.
This is basically the mistake IMO. There needs to be a balance between quality and capacity. If you're McDonald's, don't try to be a 3-star Michelin fancy pants restaurant that would take months just to source the ingredients. If you're a fancy restaurant, don't use store-bought pre-made pastries for your menu. It's all about what you can do.
I'll be honest, 3-4 months just because the dev wants to make things more complex and animated than what he can normally do is a lose-lose situation. Taxing on him, making him not feel like it's going anywhere, the players annoyed by the longer wait, etc. This might be doable for once in a while, but if it's going to be repeated, then we can kiss the development goodbye because the dev will 200% be burned out and the games abandoned.
I don't know if the decision to overcomplicate things is purely the dev's own personal preference or because of the players' demand, but either way, it needs to be recognized so it can be solved. The dev tries to solve this by doing half-updates, but to be honest, I don't really have high hopes on this success because it's still the same amount of work (too much) that is only split up into two. It's like if you're McDonald's and tell your customer that the order would take 2 hours to make, and then telling them that you'd give the burger in 1 hour, then the fries an hour later. That's still 2 hours for a burger and fries which is bad.
What the dev needs to do is reduce the amount of work. This can be done in 2 ways:
1. Expand the team so each person does less.
2. Reduce the complexity of the work so each person can finish things quicker.
In short,
the added complexity is not worth the time cost.
