I feel like I kinda HAVE to respond to this. Some of this is lacking context, and some of it is accurate.
For context, the poster is someone who got mad at me because I wouldn't let her use my #other-games-spoilers Discord section to relentlessly and ruthlessly shit on other games and their creators personally, to the point where I worried that other devs might see how badly they and their games were getting shit on in my server and not want to work with me because of it. I have had people avoid me because of a single community member with a bad reputation before, and I was loathe to have it happen again in the WCA space.
And it's fairly obvious she hasn't been paying any attention since she left.
First, I'm very aware the game is flawed. That's the whole reason for the rewrite. The negative and critical reviews are what pushed me to even start a rewrite in the first place, and also to make the latest roster decisions: Moving Cecilia and River into the "Secret" category so that you have to opt-in to their content rather than be overexposed if you're not into that sort of content. Some people hated Cecilia, River, the Harpy, and Chiara in particular so badly that these characters ruined the game for them. And I listened. I'm not gonna pretend my game is some shining star of perfection in a sea of mediocrity; it's a first game. The Prologue in particular is fucking atrocious and needs the most attention. I had to rewrite the beginning of my first fantasy novel 7 times before it was fit for consumption. I'm very lucky to have gotten the amount of positive attention that I have on what is essentially still a first draft. Cecilia's mannequin scene has been cut out and moved to her private quest file, and that long ass training sequence is getting cut, too. The flashback will likely be edited, and the overall negativity and suffocating man-hating atmosphere that is driving away first time players is being toned down. All because y'all stepped up to let me know you had a problem with it. Now, obviously, I can't please everyone, but I don't want the Prologue to end up being a barrier to entry, either. That wouldn't have happened if I was in denial.
Second, the past couple of public updates were December 20th and September 21st, so yeah, there's merit to the space between updates. I've been working my ass off to try to speed up the update times by bringing on people to help me out, but they're not clones of me and each have their own working speed and content/job preferences, and I can't change that. For instance, the guy I hired on as a side story writer, BoogleDoodle, no longer wants to write. He wants to do posing. And that's fine, 'cause he's getting good at it, but he made that choice at a time when I was onboarding two people for posing lol. Soooooo now I'm back to being the sole writer, which again, slows stuff down a tad. Unmedicated ADHD is the biggest blockade in that regard, but my income is low enough now that I have state health insurance, and that's one of the first things I'm gonna try to get tackled. This is not a sprite-based game. I chose what is perhaps the most tedious method for shooting scenes, and that's on me. I made a lot of mistakes in the early days that I am continually undoing as I work on the game in the present. Once of which is swapping compression systems, which I am working on now. It involves rebuilding the entire file structure for the "images" folder of the game and mass replacing things in nearly every single reference file I've made. If I was working purely on story stuff and leaving that stuff as is, yeah, this would probably be quicker. But as it stands I have to manage my time between the Season 1 rewrite, backend systems work, and Season 2 new content, which ultimately means it takes longer for a new Season 2 update to come out... for now.
Thankfully, what this means is the Season 1 rewrite and the backend systems work have a finite amount of things that need to be done. Eventually, these two nodes of work will be finished, and all that will remain will be new content. We'll get there. Just takes time.
Which brings me to my final point. While my goal is to shorten the time between updates, the reality is that I live in America with no one supporting me, so rent and food come first. The initial release schedule ended up being 3 updates per year, which is triple what games like Light of my Life and other titles I love tend to do. And as the game gained support and earning enough to pay my rent and some of my bills, I began to transition out of my day (night) job and dedicating more time to working on it. The more money it made, the more I could pull away from my security job and dedicate time to making this. When the income sags, I have to make it up somehow, and that typically involves trading my time at either the security job or doing UberEats for that money. It's a continuum. Unless this game somehow blows up after the rewrite (I don't think it will, but I'll be pleasantly surprised if it does), it will always be that continuum. I will base the amount of time I spend working on the game on the amount of bills it allows me to pay without forcing me to sacrifice that time doing security work. People purchase a title to compensate for past work done. People support an ongoing title on SubscribeStar and Patreon style services to support future content. I understand the logic in the poster's "spiral" statement, but for me, the cause and effect are backwards.
I love this project and the AVN community I've been learning so much about, and I would LOVE for game development to be my living someday. I have so many ideas for other AVNs and projects you all might adore, but for now I only have the one game, and when income for the game sags, I have to swap my focus to more guaranteed and stable forms of income to ensure I make rent and can afford food and utilities. Some people have no idea what this is like, and that's painfully evident in their posts. And if that slows down the game, so fuggin be it. Slowdowns are temporary, and I always have vacation time I can burn to take time off of work and get paid while working on the game at home. It will never go fully on hold because I always get to dedicate at least one night a week to working on it, but survival comes first, always. Anything who tells you differently is trying to sell you something.
This game will never be Summertime Saga. I will never be DarkCookie, making over $60,000 per month. I am nowhere near as talented as that team and have no grand illusions about that. I am still, after 2 and a half years of WCA being available to the public, a VERY new game dev, and someone who HAS to be open to learning. I learn new things every day, some of which give me ideas for how to make WCA better, and imagining people's reactions and delight about these ideas excites me. WCA is my training ground, and will never be a perfect game. I accepted that a long time ago. What I'm dedicated to now is learning how to improve it, and I think that's been fairly evident in the changes I've been making.
I'll have a devlog within the next couple of weeks detailing what's going on with the S1 rewrite and the progress that's been made. A LOT of player complaints have been resolved, and I'm working with a few people to test the changes in kind of a closed alpha to get more of an idea of how a player would feel about it. I look forward to more community feedback once I'm able to put the S1 rewrite out to Supporters and then eventually the public, and see if the rewrite is sufficient for those who were initially put off to end up enjoying the intro.
That's it for now. Hope that helps explain some things.
