I cannot say for sure if they are being honest and i can be completely wrong, but for me don't look like they are bad people, they are just people making a game on their free time.
Yup. The only thing we're "guilty" of is not managing the workflow and releases in a more timely manner. But ToLLA is our first project, and making an RPG is difficult on its own even for professional studios... let alone hobbyist devs. We've learned a lot tho, working on the game so far. Production is a lot more challenging than it sounds, especially when you gotta squeeze it in between IRL work and other duties. There's a reason professional teams have a producer who deals exclusively with workflow and time management to ensure things stay on schedule. Since we're unpaid hobbyists, we gotta wing it and hope for the best. Also on the topic of "scamming" (lmao), any money we make from ToLLA goes into the art budget, we've not personally earned a cent from the game.
There's an interesting documentary on YouTube about the production of Witcher 1, I watched it years ago and it really stuck with me... I remember one of the devs mentioning how the Witcher team was fully funded, then they spent like 2 years floundering and working on the game like a bunch of amateur noobs and going in circles until they learned how to properly structure their asset pipelines and manage the team. Because they were all noob devs and it was their first development gig. They learned on the job... same us as here, but we don't have the luxury of working full time on our game like they did. The Witcher dev in the documentary even says something like (I'm paraphrasing here):
"We had the funding, and management gave us the time we needed to learn how to make a game."
I think the biggest takeaway here is to keep content updates manageable and frequent for an adult erogame. We had a team meeting recently and talked about this at length, consensus was reached to try and push an update every other week. A 15-day production minicycle for an RPG isn't easy to pull off, but it's the only way to keep players interested during this publish-or-perish meta dominated by Patreon visual novels.
tl;dr: ToLLA's getting 2 updates per month from now on.
Thank goodness this is back! I supported this early on Itch, can't wait for new updates!
Cheers fren, thank you for the support!
The new build will be on Itch shortly...
Is there a gallery unlocke for this game?
Not in this version, but it's coming.