I recognize that these are common questions so I thought I would take some proper time to provide some answers.
First I want to acknowledge that there is a good deal of misinformation and speculation out there. This is ultimately my fault, as I am the only one who can provide definitive answers on 1) the financial situation of the game and 2) the overall snapshot of development at any given time. The unfortunate reality is that there is only so much time in the day for me to:
- Coordinate tasks for four artists
- Compile and organize the art that they give me into a centralized format
- Rig the art up into Live2D models
- Animate the models in all of their complexity
- Program the game to use these models correctly
- Supervise the game's writing
- Integrate scripts from the writers into the game
- Write and integrate new sandbox reactions into the game
- Implement tech improvements that optimize game organization, maintainability, and moddability
- Manage game finances
- Finally, update the community on progress
In the background, I'm trying to spend some time with my partner, working as a full-time medical student, and doing my best to convince my partner/family/friends that I'm not making a huge mistake by investing virtually every free hour of my life to this game when they think I should be focusing everything on medicine.
I'm truly not complaining, I absolutely love working on the game - I just want to make sure we all have the same context when we're comparing TNH update cycles and progress report frequency to other developers. Our bottleneck is *not* just money - maybe it was a year ago when I was a PhD student completely neglecting my research to work on the game essentially full-time, but today the bottleneck is money and time. And, for better or worse, I'm biased towards explicitly working on the game rather than writing lots of long-winded community updates.
Okay, let's dig into some of your points:
Why is content for later updates being drawn if other art is needed for earlier planned releases?
It's definitely not correct to assume that an art preview that looks good means that the work is in a finished state. And even if what you're seeing is in a finished state, there are *hundreds to thousands* of variant layers that go into each art piece. What I preview is the tip of the iceberg in terms of finalized product.
Now, the 0.9 art was truly finalized about a month ago, at which point I started rigging it up. Of course, in that process you find a bunch of missing pieces and so on, which required me to iterate with the artists another cycle. But otherwise, everything being worked on right now is either something that can be easily snuck onto an existing model (e.g. more clothing items) or aimed for 1.0 or 1.1.
As for why Ch. 2 sometimes gets previewed when Ch. 1 art isn't fully done, the answer is that I like working in staggered commissions like that, prioritizing things that need to be done sooner but also making progress on future tasks. I do this because:
1) It's more fun than just staring at the same art for months at end and it lets me preview you more than a single pose for an entire month.
2) It means we can start figuring out what works and doesn't work pretty far in advance. Think about the writers needing to write scenes for Dazzler without knowing what her CGs or room or standing model look like.
3) It limits how deep the to-do list gets on my desk. If I have a brutal week where I can't look at art very much, having parallel streams of art going prevents the artists from being stuck simply waiting for my feedback.
If art is the hold up, what's going on on the technical side for new systems?
So, so much. We don't talk about this as much because it kind of seems like it feeds into y'all's fear that we're just fucking around doing tech overhauls. A tech overhaul is only a bad thing if it's 1) purposeless or 2) so overwhelming in scope that it's doomed to fail or take years. Our tech overhauls are neither of these things, they tangibly improve game quality. For example, in the last couple months:
1) We've completely modularized the location system so that adding new destinations, either mansion or otherwise, is as simple and painless as possible without lots of hard-coded cross-referencing elsewhere in the game. You want to add the fucking Avengers HQ as a location module and share it as a mod? You could make the mod and distribute it as a standalone folder that players can drop into their game without needing a specialized re-build.
2) Optimized screen image definition for a smoother interface experience.
3) Added support for all of the new model features coming into the game, including tattoos, piercings, fine-tuned color changes.
4) Made significant upgrades to the Live2D engine to facilitate the above model features while preserving performance.
5) Added multi-threading image prediction to Ren'Py, which is now incorporated into the official
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. Multicore devices can now load into the game much faster.
6) Created a new mood-based expression system that reduces the need for writers to explicitly choose every single face and arm expression in the sandbox, allowing for more diverse but still contextually-appropriate expressions.
7) Overhauled the slice-of-life/social event code to use our new InteractionClass system from 0.8c, making it much easier to dynamically generate different events.
8) Released the Viewer app, which is my go-to resource for testing models in-game.
9) A bunch more features that Riven has been previewing on the Discord. So many bug fixes and quality of life changes based on suggestions.
I'm not keeping these features secret - anyone with beta access has known about them for a long time now.
Most importantly, these tech improvements at this stage in game development make it that much easier to handle the fact that our roster is going to be doubling in 1.1.
Lastly, what are the dev teams plans going forward? Are they sticking to the original plan or are plans changing.
Plans are always changing, but we try to stay true to the roadmap in big strokes. 0.9a will contain what was promised. 1.0a will focus on group activities, group sex, and sandbox content. 1.1 will introduce Ch. 2 characters with as many features as we can possibly cram into the initial release.
I understand the dev teams situation, but the harsh truth is that if you want to increase the budget you have to factor in how potential patrons view your development cycle.
Here is how you can view our development cycle:
- I am operating at a loss of about $25k from working on this game, to date. It grows by ~$500 - $1000 a month depending on how aggressively I try to push our art progress. With the fundraiser, this will be the first month in the black in - idk, a year?
- No one on the team has made a single cent despite working on the game like it's a second full time job. This is the single biggest reason people should fund the game - so that I can pay all these wonderful people making this game that is free to enjoy.
- I sit down to work on the game within 45 minutes from when I get home to ~5 hours before I have to get up for my hospital shifts.
Despite this, we still pump out updates and previews as regularly as we can, and development is progressing very well from my perspective. Perhaps even more importantly, I remain super excited to work on TNH. It's on my mind throughout the work day and something I spring out of bed on my off days to get to. We release regular beta builds for people interested in more granular progress - the last couple weeks have seen multiple builds a day.
To summarize, I get it. Patreon subscriptions are investments and you want to feel like it's a good one. I can't mitigate all of the risk factors in this investment for the entire community - it's honestly beyond the scope of what I have time or emotional energy for. And because of this, I truly can't blame someone who is skeptical of the game and for whom money is tight for not financially supporting it.
All I can ask is that you consider the human beings who are busting their asses for nothing so that you can enjoy your fantasies and ask for news on the next update.
