I agree with 60% of this comment. However, as per the release schedule.. It's been passed around for a while that a big reason why the remake took a year to release was because Snats was pre-creating a bunch of characters which would supposedly decrease development time. If this is false, I'd like to see the original posts about the remake, but until then I'm going with this narrative.
This further compounds with the narrative that the remake had to happen because the OG models were causing clipping problems, which seemingly slowed down development. So, on one hand, the pre-creation of characters should speed up development, and the new characters should also speed up development, but development was not sped up, how is it a non-issue?
Plus, it feels like development times have been increasing across the board within this community, so there are going to be those that are already unhappy with the state of the community, but then this happens in a game they enjoy? Naturally they're going to be annoyed. When you add in the fact that so many people disliked the initial release? Not to mention that people are gradually discovering that Snats has a stretch goal for creating a second game on his SS despite being unable to finish the intro for this one?
You make plenty of fair points. I didn't really take the narrative that the work up until now had a secondary intent of speeding up all future updates into account in my first message for two main reasons. The first is I have only seen this mentioned as hopeful remarks made by this community and not an actual statement/promise made by the dev. It definitely makes sense that having every single asset from characters to areas to everything in between
should help the game development progress far more smoothly especially since it indicates that there is a clear laid out plan for how the story will progress and things aren't just being made up with each new update. So while I do try to keep a more positive mindset, it is very discouraging to see all of that seemingly not being the case. And if Snats had made remarks alluding to this being one of the selling points of why the remake must be done then yeah that is more than a valid reason for the people to be upset or agitated.
As for the second reason I didn't take it into account is I don't think Snats's struggles lie in asset creation. Sure there was the clipping with bigger models, but the stuff they make looks fantastic and judging by the immense character roster, it's something they have a knack for. Judging from the state of older releases and what far more knowledgeable people have said on this forum in the past I think Snats is just terrible at coding the actual game. Personally, when the remake was announced I was always hoping the dev had gone back and taken the time to seriously review how to add and code all the features they had planned rather than creating all the characters since the code is the basis everything else will sit upon. I think if we are to give Snats the benefit of the doubt this would explain why despite having everything in place from the story to the character models to the environments made ahead of time we have not seen an increase in development speed. Because, you can't do anything with any of them if the game just crashes nonstop or whatever other issues may exist.
As for the community as a whole I really can't speak about that. Game development is not an easy thing and everyone will have a different starting point in both their skill as well as their natural talent for learning things quickly. But I still see plenty of games with very regular, well-maintained update schedules such as Crimson High. On the other hand, I also see games getting abandoned frequently as well. This is a large space that has only grown and so it's really hard to make these umbrella statements about whether or not things are getting worse.
Lastly, pertaining to the stretch goal to start the development of another game I agree, I think with the current development time that is just a dumb idea. But, Snats has always had this goal. Back before the patreon was nuked it was the highest tier goal and something Snats refered to as something they would do if their community showed interest in it. So this isn't a new notion that popped up out of nowhere. I don't know why this has only just recently become such a hot issue. If this was only recently added to the goals on the subscribestar page then that is admittedly a bad look. What I hope is the case is that this is just something they carried over from Patreon without a second thought and has been an ambitious hope/dream in the creator's mind for a long time and nothing more than that. I hope this isn't something they would actually act on the second the goal was met or something like that without considering just how this could impact Twisted World. But to know the truth the dev would have to communicate with the community and just tell us flat out what's going through their mind. And at the end of the day that's what I hate most about this. We're mostly left to speculate and hope or give the benefit of the doubt when instead it'd be great if we could just ask Snats what is going on and get a simple, clear cut answer.
