While I share your frustration with the games stability on the previous platforms, as I am a fan and a player of the game myself before I was involved with the project, that's also why I decided to work with Motkeyz. You seem so frustrated like Motkeyz is not is not doing the best he can to realize the games full potential. You say that the game has been in development for 5 months, but this is not that simple. Maybe the project has been active for 5 months but it has suffered massive setbacks. While they have been working for MONTHS on the renders and the story which passes on through the engines, an immense amount of work is put in switching platforms to accommodate all the feedback from the players. Many games hit the grave around this time, just look at all the abandoned stuff out there. The fans around the world that stay engaged with this project has been the driving force to continue.
What was Motkeyz supposed to do? The reality is that most artists do not have a development background but wanted to make a game, this is what it's about. They are getting great feedback and support from the community as well.
Motkeyz reached the point of frustration to almost give up, because all the hard work put into each platform change, has caused new other problems. The renders are absolutely amazing, but the engines have been crap, and not only that, but every engine out there today requires tons of time to set up to get it the way you want, and if you tweak anything and don't have an extensive development background you end up with tons of new bugs and instability.
I can tell you this, the project is going stronger than it ever has. It is harsh to put this negativity on the project after everything that has been going on especially in the last month. Motkeyz has also communicated extensively that he is doing everything to ensure quality, it's not like he continued with the first platform and ignored everyone comments.
I was approached by Motkeyz a little bit over a month ago, maybe a week before the announcement on our collaboration, to join on this project and to make sure that the game will reach its full potential, and that's what I'm doing. I set a realistic deadline for getting the entire game re-done from scratch within 2 months, and already now halfway through the time, the development is 95% done and stable. Content Migration and the CG album are the only two major tasks right now, out of more than 40. I'm not simply going to say that I will release this earlier at this point even if we already know that this update today/yesterday is going to be sub-par platform wise.
This is not any of ours full-time jobs, but we're spending more than full-time of time to deliver all of this, because we love the project.
I have been working my ass of for a month so far, using all my spare time when not sleeping or working my dayjob, and I can't show any of it now because we are doing polishing work as we go.
I have my name on this, and my own product VNGINE, if this is bad it's not just sad for this project, but it's my own reputation on the line which I do care a lot about.
ON VNGINE Day 1:
1. The engine will be optimized as far as possible for the first launch, and will continuously be improved as we go.
2. There will be no random freezes, if there are any they are not random, but related to computer performance.
3. We are aiming at making Timestamps more sandboxy, which means we allow more free navigation and doing things in your order. But we can't do much with that yet today, as it requires more content that we have planned in the future and a lot of time we will invest after we've launched on the new engine. Right now you will see significant improvements in room navigation for example.
4. We're not putting any DRM on the game, like some others, because of greed.
5. I've done extensive research on other games when it comes to features, things that need improvement, stability, and I am doing everything possible to avoid anything out there.
6. We will not have random "script errors" like in renpy, where your shit just crashes.
7. We will not trigger "blue screen" like doing in Unity, which means that you are pointing to something that doesnt exist.
8. I will do extensive quality control on the game, before releases and has set at least 1 week of time for this in every release cycle.
9. The Engine is faster.
10. The engine has a much more comprehensive save and load mechanic under the hood.
11. You will be able to reverse through all your choices in the game, even if you forgot to save before it.
12. All the saves are sorted by latest save date, all saves have screenshots as well, like seen in other engines.
13. Save files are easy to export and import.
14. Save files persist through game versions, so you will not lose your progress just because we updated the game.
15. The game will run on any resolution right now but capped at 1080p for best results, since the renders are 1080p. This means if you go lower resolution, it will scale down the game and you won't get a squashed or misaligned game.
16. The platform is completely flexible in development, as I know it inside and out, and do not rely on any third party support. Noone will break the platform except for me, I don't depend on any other library, asset or person.
17. Game will be uploaded more stable and swiftly using a 100up fiber connection.
18. The only limit in game functionality comes from my own creativity, if I cannot solve something I find out, and we haven't seen anything we couldn't do that made sense.
To point at many things done from my trello list:
Engine Core:
* New character naming system
* Inventory System, with beautiful UI and on-hover tooltips.
* Advanced save and load functionality (Not game version dependent)
* Reversing through all your choices.
* Advanced Dialogue Parser
* Money system
* Own asset container file for all our assets, to prevent Unity compiled game size to be too big.
* Very gorgeous and user friendly Save & Load interface.
* Advanced game options such as dialogue text scaling, typewriter effect, typewriter speed.
* Unity remembers your last game settings such as resolution / windowed mode
* More sound channels, that will be correctly used. SFX, Ambience, Music
Timestamps core
* Scripted intro support
* Room navigation
* Special item triggers in rooms.
* UI Special effects, screen shakes, zoom effects, slide effects.
* New cursors, also chaging cursors depending on interraction type, for example when navigating.
Anyways, It's alright if you don't feel like playing this current game version, I totally understand that. This is for the fans that we didn't want to miss out on a release-cycle of renders. We already know the engine sucks, and most people do.
Stick around, or don't, but In one month from now the game will be something that you never thought was possible in this short time of development. Look at a game like glamour, how long did he work on that, and he can't even get the basics over from his previous game, now that's what I consider unacceptable, with an insane amount of funds for what he is doing, he rather work on DRM than to deliver something actually nice for the fans.
Glad you enjoy the renders, and I hope you will love the new Timestamps 0.0.1 on VNGINE in one month from now. See you then!
End Update
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