I'm gonna pile up my opinion about SS because why the hell not, you all have nothing better to read anyway.
I've been keeping in touch[ish] with this game for 3+ years now so I know plenty about its evolution.
From the get go I'll say the TL;DR: I love the artwork and some of the perversity. I hate how badly the project is managed, how it strings people along and how DC bent over for Patreon's Mind Police sinking the game into vanilla porn instead of creating a legendary porn town where most have a dirty incesty secret at home.
Now I'll explain each point.
I think everyone agrees with the good so there's no point going over it. Artwork is good. Perversity is sometimes good. That annoying sister is such a good hate fuck. Mom and aunt excellent whores. The lactating aunt, mmm yummy. The milk factory idea, fantastic! Preggers everywhere, fuck yeah! Shemales, uuuuuu nasty! Erik fucking his mom, mmmmmm mmm!
The bad however, oh THE bad!
First of all, many of you need to educate yourselves about philosophy of art in order to avoid stupid flame wars. All these "You didn't pay so don't complain!", "He don't owe you notin'!", etc. are arguments that have been settled centuries if not millennia ago because they apply to all artwork.
Once a work of art leaves its creator's arms and is exposed to the public, said piece no longer belongs to the creator but to everyone who has experienced it. In our material societies the physical piece does belong to someone and, unfortunately, the rights to create copies and derivatives also belong to someone but the spirit of what I said still remains. Everyone who has been touched by a work of art is the owner of said piece because it has left a deep impression in their brain and so has a right to critique or otherwise express an opinion.
This is why it doesn't matter at all if you paid money or not for this game. As long as you experienced it you have the right to express an opinion and, very importantly, you have the right to an opinion about its continuation and the path it takes into the future.
People are rightfully feeling betrayed when their work of art is undermined by its creator or mutilated. OF FUCKING COURSE! This was settled LONG LONG ago. Educated yourselves and you will avoid pointless squabbling. I certainly wasn't born knowing these things or figuring them out by myself, that's for sure.
Now, returning to a more succinct pointing out of the bad parts in SS.
DC is stringing people along. Or to put it another way, he has found a comfortable position where he gets $65k/month delivering at a leisurely pace and he's enjoying it a little too much. Frankly, I don't consider it immoral and I think every single one of you motherfuckers would do the exact same thing. Are you going to be the one who risks changing things and breaking that steady income stream? I think not. He's not forcing people to contribute, they just do. It is what it is.
On the other hand, everyone is free to whine. Go ahead. It won't change shit. Maybe there should be a dedicated thread just for these whines.
But then, the project is managed so SO badly. I don't mean just in terms of schedule (he suggested 0.20.x would take 6-8 months and instead it will take over a year). I mean artistically. I now play this game once per year and even that is too often if I want to play everything from the start. It takes too long, it's too fat and not in a good way. It takes a week to play it truly and read all dialogues. Nobody has the time for that. The decision to not break it down into some kind of episodes is so painfully stupid because the game already has very distinct internal "routes" but they feel extremely disjointed. If you play all the routes at once you are overloaded with events and yet you get the distinct impression that nothing you do on one route has any significant impact on another, as you would expect. Instead you get events happening in mechanical succession because of how you play but the events are on distinct routes so they appear incoherent.
The argument put forward by DC for not going episodic is laughably stupid. What he claimed was he wants to be able to keep adjusting inter-routes dependencies so that as new routes are added/changed, the other routes can also be adjusted accordingly. Well, that's top shelf stupid, isn't it? Because it sure as hell hasn't happened in practice. Every time completely new routes have been added there haven't been any significant changes on existing routes. Even with this latest adventure of upgrading the main story in 0.20.x, what was the impact on teacher's route, Roxxy route, Aqua, etc.? ZERO.
And what was the cost? Broken resume-saves and a disjointed game world that breaks the suspension of disbelief with a LOT happening simultaneously and yet each route happens within its own invisible bubble with no believable interference with another route.
That is what I mean by bad artistic project management. DC doesn't care about riding us along through a good story with many story lines. He just wants to jerk off for $65k/month by retouching the same shit again and again for however long the $ pours in. That is so shitty for him to do because it means we can't expect the story will be great at some point. Nobody ever stumbled into a great story by just rehashing the same shit aimlessly.
Finally, the bending for Patreon. That had very bad consequences. So much potential for perversity has been lost. How can Harold not fuck Mia? How can you pop in and not find Grace blowing her sister? How come you can't pop by Roxxy's trailer and find her fisting her mother's ass? FOR FUCK'S SAKE. The lack of these perversities is outrageous! Nobody can tell me mom shouldn't punish Jenny with some BDSM. In return, MC should tie & blindfold mom promising her some dicking only to have sis sliently snoop in to fuck her ass with a dildo in revenge. You know what I want? I want one day to look through the telescope and see Erik bent over by his mom and as she's fisting him she finds a ring he pushed up there to propose to her. That is just how things should be in a properly perverted SS world!
Instead, DC chose to bend over for Patreon and now we have a few perversions but mostly a mountain of vanilla porn.
In conclusion, everyone should just think and realise that as long as those $65k/month keep pouring in, there is literally nothing they can do except harm themselves by bitching about it.
Also, DC is a $ whore who draws well and is lucky. I can't hold my breath for him seeing the right path with a switch to episodic content where he doesn't revisit what was already shipped.
The solution for me was to switch to playing SS once per year but even that is too often. I'll try using the resume-saves they provide with new releases but I don't think that will work well. There's just too much effort needed to create those saves so that they match the end of the previous release so I have no confidence they'll make them properly.
Oh well. It is what it is. Let's all accept and work around it or just carry on.
Well, at least one can say that this is not a "DC is milking everybody"-only post. It actually contains some valid points.
However, the sad thing is that you apparently do not have the slightest idea about the interna of this game, yet you go on and boldly call everybody who has an other opinion than yourself "stupid" -- most of all DC, no less than four times in your post. I know, in relation to overall word count, that's not too much, but this does not make it better.
A post of somebody who thinks everybody else stupid normally does not deserve an answer, but I will give one anyway (because it is not a DC-milks-only post).
If you look into the coding, you will notice that there is an enormous improvement of game mechanics, starting after the Erik update. Most importantly, they introduced state machines and later layered images. Without those, the game as it is now would never have been possible. I've looked into the sources of some Ren'py games, and this is one of some really clever people.
State machines make it possible to create independent stories, enabling an open-world-like free gaming experience. This is the direct opposite of your postulated episodes approach, and exactly what makes Summertime Saga special.
Layered images greatly simplify art development and re-use, at the same time reducing the required space. If they still would draw dedicated images for each pose, the game would most likely be over 2 GB in size already. The other genious thing with layered images is that they provide an easy way to automate things which would otherwise have to be coded by hand, speeding up such things drastically.
The development of all this did certainly not come for free, and slowed down things in the beginning. But later development will benefit from it. I am sure that Jenny, Eve, Consuela and Maria would not have gotten so much content without it.
Of course that's only my opinion, but I have some insight into that game. I certainly did benefit from those implementation decisions in the past when developing the mod.
The other thing is the, in my opinion, phantastic story writing (there are exceptions and not everything has the same level of quality, but I do know only a small handful of games that can compare to that).
You claim there is no real inter-story dependency. This is, as DC explained several times, to be dealt with once the game is in a more finished state. I cannot see what should be "stupid" with that wise decision. Stupid would be to change story dependencies with each new release, when it is to be expected that new stories will influence everything else. Better do this at the end, and for good.
