I for one appreciate the animation, but I understand it's time consuming. I'm not sure if this is a good idea, but maybe put aside the animation for now to accelerate finishing the game, then work on a DLC to put extra animation scenes?
Voice acting, I appreciate when it's done Japanese way, but not when it's in English, I'm weird like that. In games like Ravager or Love & Base, I just tolerate it rather than enjoying.
Video; well you can go like JP eroge, some sort of video at the start to see some content of the game with some music to go along.
If we added voice acting, it'd be minimal (non-verbal VA like moans, possibly small phrases) and optional. We could use the same infrastructure we have for playing other audio for playing voice acted lines.
We've made the determination that animations are worth it. People like them, and they're actually easier to work with in some ways than still images for variation, so we can add a lot of nuance and diversity with them. To clarify, we don't want to hire a contractor to help with animations so that Alis can focus on the Important Art Stills, we
could hire a contractor to work on the animations and we can't do the same for an artist to replace Alis working on the stills. It's not a matter of which is important, it's a matter of which ones are even viable to get extra hands on. Someone
might notice that this or that animation was done by a different animator, but they'll definitely notice if we use different character artists.
A video editing contractor would basically just be for trailers and other marketing stuff - like if we go up on Steam it'd be helpful to have some footage roll in the previews and the like. Not necessarily for the game per se, although a little attract mode could be cute.
The thing is, while I want the game done, we don't actually have any kind of Release mechanism the way a traditional game does. It's possible the game won't even be allowed on Steam, and we already have it on itch, so the release build is going to be v1.0 and... that's it. We don't have marketing or merchandising tie-ins that need launch by a certain date. Nobody's printing discs or packages, and the wholesale retailers are not waiting for their shipments, the reviewers are not waiting for their review copies. I want the game to be a playable experience Start to Finish, but the game being "done" doesn't actually really buy anyone anything. Plenty of patrons (and otherwise) would want us to just continue working on the game indefinitely, similar to, say, Dwarf Fortress. I don't know exactly what the post-Release support is going to look like, but it's probably going to look much like pre-release updates for a good while.
Like, I don't like saying this because it feeds into the "they don't even want to finish!" narrative, but it doesn't actually matter when we finish, and we didn't go into this saying "we need to get this game done before the third fiscal quarter of 20XX or the brass is going to have our asses!" As long as we're still adding things that people like to the game, nothing explodes, nobody dies, and I'm not sure why anyone thinks otherwise other than a misguided belief that the way typical game development works is universally applicable, even when (for reasons I mentioned above) it obviously isn't.
People have long lists of what they think we need to do to finish the game, and those lists are basically all wrong and have nothing to do with either what we've planned or the commitments we've actually made. I'm hoping we'll finish next year, but
I haven't left my apartment in nine fucking months, and I certainly didn't plan
that for this year, so who knows what next year will bring. Also, 2022 is probably a more realistic target, and it's extremely unlikely we wouldn't be able to finish by then.
The roadmap to release is the beta roadmap, so if you want to see what we have left, it should basically all be in there, barring stuff on the feature request backlog that will be added from the patron surveys.
Merry Christmas. I'm working on a new cave encounter with a naga.
