by BloodyMares » Sun, 18Jan21 23:09
I'm not sure I'm okay with the monthly releases...On one hand, it would be awesome for you as it will no doubt give you an influx of income from new patrons. And I would be happy to see more of Christine. On the other, I have rather negative experience with this than positive..
What can go wrong:
1) A shorter development time can cause quality decline: less time for bug-testing, rendering, meaning that you'll probably end up releasing patches when you need to focus your effort on the next chapter and so on. Or, the opposite, you'll keep moving forward with no desire to fix the bugs in the previous chapters. The game can also become stale. Just look what happened to Assassin's Creed franchise with its yearly releases. Many players could lack behind because they wouldn't have time to play your games so often. It's harder to keep track of what you've played if there's like, 17 samey chapters.
2) Stretching storytelling/filler chapters. Almost all games of this type have at least one episode where basically nothing interesting happens, either story-wise or sex-wise or even both. Fillers bring no enjoyment and you are forced to wait another month hoping to see something worthy next release. Fillers aside, it's very easy to become out of ideas (even for you) but "the show must go on", right? So there's a chance that the game can become a pale shadow of its earlier days either because it goes nowhere or because it derailed too much from its original idea or because it became overcrowded with secondary characters.
3) Linear vs Non-linear storytelling. If you decide to implement decision-making, you'll go crazy, I'm telling you now. You won't be able to acknowldedge every decision as its number would grow exponentially. Thus neverending bugs or plotholes. Too many games have fallen into this trap. One game's developer that I won't name even had to patch some of the previous choices out. The only way I see for this to work is to make the episodes linear.
4) $$$ vs regular fans. I'm not accusing you of anything but it's tempting to disregard non-patrons. I've seen it happen too many times.
Now, what I described to you was an example of developers with only one immediate project. You plan to have two. All I ask is to give this some more thought and if this decision is final, take baby steps, test the waters. I'm curious to see what happens with "Darkness Falls" but even if it fails, it won't be too sad because you can always go back to making full games about the main girls. Christine however is very dear to me and I'm just very cautious about this.
That said, I wish the best of luck to you and hope that everything that I described would not happen to your games as well because until now, they have been the only ones that I truly enjoyed.