Stronk, after reading your post and looking at your poll, I'd like to give you my two cents on the subject. Firstly, the quality of your work is not holding you back. Your story is interesting, and the artwork is equal to many projects that are 'successful'.
However, you yourself identified in the post the reason for your lack of greater success (in my opinion) while leaving it out of the poll. Consistency. I've followed more than a few games on this site, and it doesn't seem to matter for donation success whether you put out a lot of small updates really fast, or bigger updates on a 2-3 month rotation. What matters is that you can be relied on to deliver on some sort of schedule, and that the updates be of similar length and quality each time.
There's no mechanism in place to protect people who donate to the development of these games' money, and so many people see erratic updates as dangerous - they can't be sure they'll feel like they're "getting what they paid for". One month they might get an update, then they might have to wait three or four, but they're still paying the same amount either way - it makes it hard to justify the cost.
If you want to grow your pool of donations, you need to find a release schedule that works for you, and stick to it. And you need to do so with similar quality and length updates each release, and you need to show that you can do that for a while. I'm not saying this to criticize how you've been doing things. I know you're very serious about making a finished project. These comments are just based on my observations of how other games have built a good pool of funding.
I hope your VN succeeds, as I am enjoying it immensely.
I'll throw my two cents in as well.
This part:
What do my players want to see from me.
Faster releases ?
Bigger releases ?
Perhaps more infos about Project Jericho ?
Hell how about a Project Jericho Alpha followed by a public build down in reasonable delay ?
Or perhaps you'd prefer having a bit more art like the one I did a few days back while waiting for a public release ?
I'll be blunt but honest. Me personally, I don't care if it takes 4 months to deliver. I don't care about teasers, or art, or pinups. The one thing, only one thing, is consistent releases. I've been here long enough to see all kinds of developers and I gotta say that the two that bother me the most are the ones that never release anything, all the while promising they will, and continue milking their patrons. The other ones that bother me are the ones that announce release dates 3 or 4 times and delay every single time. Stop giving dates if you never reach it. I'm fine with long wait times but fucking stop with the release dates that never come. Just tell people it'll be done when its done. If that is 4 months, then so be it. (Yes, I know life gets in the way so delays are inevitable.)
If you want more people to come to Patreon, you'll need to do some advertising and also some changes. People don't like to subscribe to a developer only to be told that the update is delayed for the 5th time or that the developer is working on other games instead of the one they subscribed for. When people see developers start working on other games before the 1st is finished they take it as a sign that the 1st is abandoned and they usually leave. Some stay, but most go. I know that developers need to take breaks to prevent burn out but I'm saying what we as a consumer see. Also, people like to be kept in the loop. Dev blogs are a good thing, in some cases. (I've seen some where the developer is giving out blogs even though they haven't released anything for two years.) Keeps people informed. Maybe you could do a graph that some developers do. Shows the percentage of renders, code, script, etc etc. Just something to show people that work is being done.
Just my two cents. I like you Stronk. You made a great game that I'd love to see finished. A large family with Chumee is all I need. (Reading back now it looks like I am attacking Stronk but I can assure you I'm not.)
I think for most of my time I took the problem the wrong way I felt like I needed to put out updates faster than bigger, and the poll reflects that.
I'm grateful for the feedback friends, it's desperately needed lately, if people want a chunky update, I'll do my best to deliver one, I wanted to release sort of like Arc, micro updates every two weeks, but I think people might prefer a large update even if it takes more time.
When is part 3 update coming this month or june ?
0.11 will come out in the coming month for sure.
Right now he is working on a second game, Project Jericho. So probably more realistically around September/October.
As I said Project: Jericho right now is more of a side project, basically when I'm done playing around with Fantasy I fiddle around in HS2, but for now Tales of Unity is still my first project and I allocate 70% of my development time as small as it is to it!
I think when people are being billed monthly they should see a 4-6 week update at the most. Anything shorter than 4 weeks is just going to be too small to be worth it for anyone. But paying 4 months for a single update is just too long.
That's a fair assessement, but I think people overall made themselves clear, they'd rather large updates no matter how long so that's what I'll focus on.
I want to go back to my monthly / bimonthly schedule at one point, back from 0.1 to 0.6 I was able to release a very large update every 2 month at most !
And that's what I'm aiming for right now.
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Consider that I began working actively on 0.11 today the beta I posted a few weeks back is but a fraction of what 0.11 is supposed to be.
I'll post more devblog, I'm quite happy with the flow of posts I made lately so I'll keep at it while working, thanks a lot for all the feedback !
