Hi Sinners !
Long time without writing and six months since last release. Time sure flies. This won't be a "happy" update for those who like the game, but I feel people liking The Theater deserve the transparency. It won't be sad either, just a tad disappointing.
1) The game is being developed. No buts. I still sit every day and write, do my renders and advance the story. It's fun.
2) I have enough content to make a release which would be roughly the same size as 0.3.alpha. Content is also pretty good IMO.
But here the disappointing part. There won't be any release in the short / mid term. Why is that ?
Mainly two reasons.
1. The release cycle makes the development of this game exponentially more complicated.
In typical release cycles you add enough content to make a release and keep your player base "happy". The content is linear and most of the story lines don't affect each other. The effort of writing is mostly linear, since the routes don't interact. I experienced this while writing Clara BitterSweet. Simple plot, only two character growths to explore (Clara, her dad), simple to write.
In the Theater of Sinners all stories are interleaved and there are certain milestones that need to happen. Those milestones require the participating character to have the appropriate state of mind to make the interaction "believable". Because the plot advances in several timelines and perspectives. I can't just freely write events which look good and call it a day, everything needs to be cohesive.
I have literally rewritten the event I am working on right now several times to make it fit future shown events. More than one month "lost". Not literally, since the event keeps growing (583 renders as today) and its quality improving. But it is a bit taxing having to discard good ideas because it breaks the already shown timeline.
So, this is the first reason. It makes my life as a story teller a bit more miserable, because I can't backtrack to a shown event and adapt it to the new ideas.
2. Motivation.
This is a hobby. I have been writing for myself since I was a very little kid and 'The Theater of Sinners' is an adaptation of some stories I had written long ago. Some sort of horror + love + sex genre if that's a thing. I added porn and made it a porn game because I like porn games and I was a bit disappointed in how games were kind of a collection of unrelated sexual events, a weird hentai'sh progression (hj, bj, sex, anal) or some cliche'ish relationship simulators with contextual stories. There are great games out there, don't get me wrong. Just not exactly what I was looking for.
At some point I got a bit greedy seeing how much some developers make. Blame the Steam boom =D Not the 'I want to make money out of this' kind, but the 'wouldn't it be nice if I could pay for some electricity bills' kind. I try aligning the greed with my own morals by not delivering 'promises' for money (which is how I understand subscription model) and opening 'Clara BitterSweet', a finished projects, for donations. That didn't go well, so I just accepted that this is a hobby that costs me money and moved on.
But that created the real issue. I am quite a "no fucks given" person. But I inadvertidly created a platform to measure the success of my own work. And let me tell you, it is bad =D Clara BitterSweet was fucking horrific but The Theater of Sinners is much worse (I am not talking about money, I am talking about clicks, etc). I could make ten thousand excuses as why... the genre, the style, the darkness. But the reality is they are both unpopular because of my own shortcomings and that's all. So even if knowing whether what I write is good or not won't stop me from writing. Knowing people don't give a fuck doesn't help my motivation to write publicly so to say =D
In fact, I noticed that after the last two releases I had several weeks were my writing was too dark and I would keep obsessing a little bit about the 'clicks or whatever'. I know it would start again if I were to release and I don't want to have to come to terms with the unpopularity again.
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Well, this took much longer than I thought. I am a bit sorry for the people who like the Theater, since it will be still be a while until I release something. I will probably release the whole season one all together somewhen this year. A man can dream =D I am genuinely sorry for the people who like this and were waiting for a sooner release.
Topic tags and so on (regarding abandoned). This site has its own rules, so if the project is tagged so be it. No need to take my word if not willing too. It is plenty of threads with devs saying A but doing B actually, so I understand the general lack of trust.
