Honest critique here.
The visuals are nice, the gameplay is alright, and the SFX are great.
I get the need to dump as much effort into the story as possible, but if you're going to double down on that, the last thing you want is monthly premiums to access demos that may or may not link to one another. If the story isn't short, coherent, and out of the way for people trying to get into the lewds-- the story will bring everything you worked on to a screeching halt because we have to listen to something that we don't really want much to do with.
The whole thing with the builds being separate and patrons not really being able to get the full gist of the story from a single demo is an unfortunate side effect of, well, everything you just mentioned; it's not something we'll be doing for future games.
At this rate, I'd have said last year's builds should have been bundled together and sold as it's own product-- so at least people can get the flow of the game, a nice title, some great anims, and maybe get yourself a podium to show off the talents-- but I do feel like there aren't many who are as passionate about the characters as the developers are, which seems to have slowed down production a ton when it could have been just some brain-dead good animations with pretty lights released years back.
Production hasn't really "slowed down" at any point, it's just unforseen errors/issues, really.
That said, regarding the story, if you check the Discord and other places, you'll see that people are probably
more passionate about the story in this game than anything else; regular discussions of the lore/story happen on the Discord involving a lot of people for hours on end, and by far on most places (and with polls we've ran), the story and voicework are the key factors that got people to actually pledge instead of pirating it or just passing it off as something to fap to and forget.
Probably 80+% of the discussion of the game at any point is about story stuff; the porn in the game is usually rarely discussed by comparision. People basically came for the porn, stayed for the gameplay/story.
Again, I'm not bashing any of the people who worked on the game itself, I just believe the game should have dialed down on the actresses/story and just given people the game earlier. Animators should be given a break sooner or later.
The artwork is actually the thing that needs the least remaining work left; the majority of the work is on the programming/writing/audio part of things right now.
Our only artist, TriangulatePixels, pretty much decides when he works, for how long he works, and on what; we never push him or ask him to do anything more than what he's ok with.
And don't rely on patrons for income for future games. Patreon has a nasty reputation among this community-- it's sometimes unspoken, but some of us paid hundreds of dollars for games we never even got a full release for-- so you can imagine how that platform will harm how people will see your game. Patreon is more of a tombstone to any title these days than a boosted platform. We all have our stories about that place.
Unless the Steam sales go insanely well, we'll need to continue relying on Patreon.
Kickstarter won't bring nearly enough money for anything close to a decent game, and while Steam sales will help, they're not going to be enough to fund a full, new game.
At the end of the day, we want to make very high quality, very content-dense games; not because they make money, not because we want to be special, or anything else like that, it's just because we want to do it.
There's a lot of people making quick cash grab adult games and games that are small in scope and content; that's totally fine and great in both cases, but that's not stuff we want to do.
Future games though should come out much faster now that we have;
- a reliable team (both in terms of a core team and external people like testers)
- our own engine effectively
- a lot of experience we didn't have when starting out with all of this
