I and others have also voiced concerns of feature creep months ago. But these days, the team got bigger, and the art budget seems to be working out for the time being, so I'm fairly confident that the team will make good on my wishlist of two major things in the foreseeable future:
- Finally kill off Consent Simulator™ by providing platonic conversation options for the girls.
- And
fucking Kitty in the ass having very loving and tender encounters with Kitty's anus Kitty.
The art budget is always the main barrier. It is 'working out' right now because Ron is paying a large chunk of it out of pocket and a handful of bigger donors are paying about 70% of the rest. It's sustainable but slow.
Ron has said before and I will repeat again that the vast majority of the budget is for artwork. A major code update was recently completed because it was deeply necessary and the art budget had slowed the artwork down enough that the coders could focus on the code update since the game's overall progress was bottlenecked by art.
The Patreon page has 5300 members. Only 775 pay anything at all. The other 4525 are just lurking and waiting for content. Of the 775 paid members, fewer than 200 people comprise 70% of the Patreon's income. Most of the other 575 pay 5 dollars or less, which is certainly appreciated and put to good use. It just doesn't go terribly far.
This is all to say that the speed of the art completion determines the speed of game updates. The amount of income brought in through the Patreon determines the speed of art completion. If most of the 5300 people who are signed up for Patreon updates paid even $1 per month, all of the art for 1.1 would be done in a few months and the rest of the devs could be paid to finish the writing and coding in the same period.
200 people are paying for 70% of this game. With over 5000 Patreon members and an F95 thread well past 1000 pages.
Ron has always been extremely transparent about where the money goes. He isn't using it to gas up his car or pay his rent. It all goes directly to the game and most of it goes to art.
'Feature creep' doesn't mean jack shit when the art costs are $5000/month and Patreon is only covering 3500 of that because thousands of people care enough to complain about the game's dev speed but not enough to pay a lousy buck a month.
