Disagreed in turn, I offered polite constructive feedback and was banned from commenting more after paying a subscription for over a year. I've noticed he did the same to other subscribers giving fair feedback, labelling them as "toxic."
Okay, fair enough. I saw those comments, and I wouldn't have necessarily exploded as he did, but he had a point, those suggestions went completely against the game 9crux is making.
It seems he's winging his development and proceeding as if it was his plan all along to make 3 separate games while people pay monthly for them.
He's winging development because he had no idea what he's getting into. His plan was to have a sandbox game but without grind all along, except there's a slight problem, he didn't have any idea how to do it and started off with a VN.
He's back to two games after having shelved the original TCND and moved to TCND:EX, which is the sandbox he wanted all along. He also implemented one thing that people asked for, having multiple romances. Specifically, he plans to implement them as alternate realities so that you can pursue all LIs in one playthrough. I've no idea how it's going to work, but I figure we'll find out.
However, you have to admit one thing. The guy is working hard enough to learn how to program his games, he can build an interface, a turn-based battle screen (in the other game) and so on. There are tutorials, but 99% of RenPy developers
never go beyond the basic visual novel or even kinetic novel (for which they don't even need RenPy).
Dev is a money leech and overly sensitive to feedback. For instance, he's made no improvements, continues with the same formula of vapid dialogue with 1-2 shot sequences of "dream" content, while the feedback around this has been overwhelmingly negative.
Here. He's not getting that feedback on subscribestar. On the contrary, he's getting praise for it. You can't expect him to change course unless he starts shedding patrons left and right. And even then, he said he wants to tell a story, and will do so even if there are no patrons around (note that he did have very few people for the first couple of months).
One strange interaction I had with the dev, I complimented the jealousy he builds up between the love interests, and for some reason he took this offensively saying he would never implement NTR and NTR was disgusting of me to bring up when NTR was never a part of the conversation
*shrugs* I know what you mean. The guy isn't a native speaker (he's a US armed forces veteran, so he has citizenship), and it clearly shows. What it shows is that he's rabidly anti-NTR and doesn't want any association with NTR in his games. From the point of view of a developer, I can totally understand him, because NTR would aggravate current patrons and attract very vocal NTR supporters. Then a dev needs to make NTR and non-NTR variants of the game, both parts suffer, patrons leave over lack of content and the game dies.
lmao, he's off his rails IMO.
I don't think he's insane. Maybe he doesn't have his priorities straight, but he's okay as far as devs go.
As for leeching money, I just subscribe every other month or even rarer. Subscribestar works on 30-day subscriptions. My method is the following:
- I subscribe using a disposable virtual card (so it's discarded immediately after use and I cannot be rebilled)
- I subscribe on months when there is a TCND release with a larger sum than I would assign monthly. I subscribed twice with $50 and got really nice renders for it, too. There's extra voting power as well.
- I plan my next subscription on Feb 4th-5th. That way I can:
- - download TCND releasing Feb 1st
- - participate in VD:V polls anticipating March release
- - download VD:v releasing Mar 1st
- - participate in TCND polls anticipating April release
- The subscription will end on Mar 6th-7th, so I can watch the polls complete and possibly influence voting at the last second (there were two dreams instead of one a release or two ago because two girls were in the first place).
Either way, if you plan to spend around $10 on a developer, it's generally better to save up this money over several months and get perks of a higher level membership instead of spending it monthly.