I would conjecture that most complainers about gaming software have probably not done:
- coding to this scale (or at all),
- thousands of pages of artwork,
- have written a novel
- or multiples of the above.
I may not like some artwork, game flow, or story of some games, but I do appreciate the work and time that has to go into it.
I chose whether or not to play it, but don't lambast the effort involved and don't understand why others do.
(stepping off the soap box now)
I don't have to conjecture
Ren'py
does 90% of the work for you. I've dabbled in game dev a little and I've seen how this program works.
The writing and art assets are different from code, those do take tons of time, especially the art assets. However, anyone doing this for a full time gig will have a work flow pipeline set up to efficiently do the work. For instance, you have style guides to adhere to for each character, and you produce different parts you can mix and match for each pose. If you're serious, you take steps to reduce your workload as much as possible.
The actual code itself is not complicated, because there's no gameplay in Summertime Saga that is complicated, innovative, or new. There's a few timed button-press puzzles! The actual gameplay loop is 1980's style point-and-click adventure stuff, and it's stuff that Renpy has built in stuff for!
The actual complexity you'd find in a visual novel is player-reactivity. Branching narrative paths, detail-contingencies. Very little of this stuff is in the game in an appreciable way. Basically, a few if-thans for a binary dialouge difference or which image to recall (the Eve cis/trans choice, for instance). Most, if not all, the various paths of the love interests and main quest aren't designed to interact with each other. This is a very basic visual novel with light puzzle and inventory management. There's no way in hell that this game should take 6 years to produce when you have people producing stuff magnitudes of complexity higher than this thing in a fraction of the time and budget.
DarkCookie doesnt' really have an excuse for his lack of ambition or ability.
