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 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.
Thats pretty much a consistent problem with most indie developers and games nowadays. Especially having your game accessible for free on this site doesn't help with the financial problems. Sure, your games get more attention but at what cost. Only a lucky select few broke that barrier and have established a decent number of paid members.
It’s not just about generosity—it’s about sustainability. It’s a broken model, and unfortunately, it’s one that a lot of indie devs are stuck with unless they pivot to paid releases or find alternative funding.
The irony is that the community clearly cares—they’re active, vocal, and passionate. Without financial support, caring doesn’t translate into progress. That disconnect is what slows everything down.
I think most people are just looking for a game to goon to, thus the majority who aren't donating. The Null Hypothesis is the first game that made me use F95Zone as an actual forum instead of just a porn game repository with info since I made this account.
Absolutely. My brain just fundamentally cannot process the disconnect. I've been on this planet for 5 decades. I've had good years and tough ones. At no point ever would it even occur to me to be unwilling to kick a single dollar a month to something that makes me happy. Especially knowing that if I did do that, and other people did too, it makes the whole product exponentially better for all of us.
And I should mention btw that I am not a dev, not a member of the team, and not affiliated with TNH in any way other than being a donor and a fan.
I just flat out do not understand being passionate enough about something to spend fuck-knows how many hours each month playing the game or talking on this forum about the game and yet not caring enough to throw in a lousy buck a month. It just doesn't compute.
Honestly, I was already more hyped for The Null Hypothesis than any other game or media in years and it was
your post here that gave me the last kick in the ass to donate near the end of my 250 page journey through the thread. And then I found out Patreon doesn't accept my card while PayPal is semi functional in my country...
And so I went on DMs with Ron where he thanked me for the interest but he wasn't interested in managing another platform like Subscribestar. So I went to the next option of DMing Buttholder, he said both Ron and himself were willing to accept a commission from me and add it to the game as official content but that there were several more rules than usual which I didn't mind. However, because I mainly wanted events for Emma and considering she is far from being added to the game as a Love Interest yet I deferred to her being released first.
Well, I was already inclined to donate and my rambling just now was to add context, now with this post of yours I got off my ass again and donated a couple Ko-Fis to the next best thing which is Buttholder's Ko-Fi since I still haven't solved my Patreon card issue.
It's a free game still in Beta. The game is not in its official release state. It is not at all uncommon to have incompatible saves during Beta development. Especially given that the last 4 updates did not require new saves.
Your achievement points carry over. If you actually invested as much time as you imply, then you should have more than enough achievement points to buy Perks that reduce the grind by 75%.
So Achievements are 100% not effected? Then I'll have to go edit my All-In-One post.
Idk, I guess they want more agency. I don't think it's going to be added. If it wasn't planned in the initial stages of game development its most likely not going to be put in the game.
Making a female player would require a remake of chunks of the story entirely.
Not to mention something that would piss me off, if we cant get Karma and other female X-men that are lesbians (wich i completely agree on mind you, i like respecting the stablished characters when part ofthe charm of TNHis precisely that), then how the hell would that work out with the girls that have never been anything but straight? you cant have both things be true at the same time without engagin in some serious hypocrisy.
I frankly don't support adding female Null to the game because of the resources and effort that would be needed to make it even remotely close to male Null without half-assing it. The List Of No itself says that it won't be that far off from basically making two separate TNH games at once and that's not even including the other issues like the ones you talked about.
Plus with the current funding situation as it is: "sustainable but slow with Ron covering the remainder from his pocket"; unless someone who really REALLY wants to play female Null ponies up the money for both female Null and whatever extra amount that would be needed to make it worth it I just don't see it happening.
If you don't mind if it's a lesbian game so not really using the full potential of an fmc X-Men setup, where it would be a world where "Jean gay beamed every woman", then fmc Null isn't that difficult.
But yeah, that would be technically matching the definition of having an fmc choice without really capturing the spirit of it.
That feels like a copout though. And it still doesn't solve the material difficulties of making two games at once.