- Feb 12, 2019
- 231
- 1,024
Some hints Siren
Whether you are patreon or not, here we all have the right to have an opinion, being patreon you are supporting the dev but you have no more right to the game for it.
P.S: im patreon
That is very kind of both of you to say but I can't entirely share the sentiment. As far as I know, Summer's Gone, like many other VNs on this website, is not a public release but meant by the developer for their Patreon supporters. That's their art, their project, and they are free to choose their distribution policy. Creating games takes a lot of time and money so they are well justified.
So I find it is very entitled to criticize a game you pirated. I feel free to give some feedback or suggestions sometimes but have no expectation for the developers to listen or address them. Patreons cannot make demands either it's true, but it feels reasonable that their feedback would be heard. They have a stake in the game development and it is their financial support that allows the dev to work on it, so it is a relationship that goes both ways and is important for the future of the game.
That's not to say that non-patreons are useless to the developer. There can be some good ideas if they care to read through. They bring more visibility to the game which in turn will bring more players. And some will decide to support the game on Patreon, like you two. Thumbs up!
But to go back on topic, and since you encouraged me to express my opinion fully, I also work in software development and the goals in my work life need to be a lot closer and more realistic than this. 5 years is a lifetime in software development, and like it's been pointed out before, the technology keeps evolving and will make your project quickly outdated. It is very hard to predict how your life is going to change in the next five years, what new technologies will come or how a project will live. So it's usually an absolute no-no to plan a project longer than that, there's just too many variables and you're setting up for failure.
Summer's Gone was started about 2 years ago. 3 years left for 27 chapters that's 1 chapter every 40 days. I can't see that happen. Even if we counted 5 years from now it's one chapter every 67 days, a very intense pace very unlike the pace we've seen so far.
So if I were the developer, I would wonder how I could flip that around.
- More help? I don't see that happen, the game is not flowing in money and anyway someone talented enough to work on Summer's Gone like Ocean would probably get more money and enjoy more working on their own project.
- Narrow the scope of the game? 10 chapters would seem a lot more realistic, and perhaps release sequels later. But that can seriously go against the creativity of the developer who has a story to tell and might even impact their motivation. And it changes nothing if the story remains the same but the seasons were simply divided in different games, that's still way too long a target for the ending.
- Just get more productive? It's not impossible, Ocean has been learning a lot over the course of this project, and they could analyze where their time is sunk and how to optimize it too. But this won't solve everything alone, there's simply no miracle solution to triple your productivity!
- Focus on a single game? Having a second game to develop in parallel is an obvious time sinker (it cannot be all constrained by the hardware, there's only so much time and energy a dev has in a day), but that's his choice and that's where as a non-patreon I don't feel legitimate. If I recall correctly, SG was started with another dev on Patreon, so perhaps there's a money reason why another game was developed. And that's a respectable reason if that is so, although I think it would be easier to attract patreons with full effort on a single game -> faster releases. I made the maths also when I considered supporting the game on Patreon and monthly financial support x long releases x many releases left = way more money than I was ready to spend. I'm probably not alone in that.
Edit: I posted after Ocean without having read his message. So let's dismiss my message for now and see what the new release cycle will be like this year. I'm wholeheartedly hoping for success and will reconsider becoming a patreon if things look promising.
