Thanks for the review! For the record, the game has one dev, and the progress he makes each month (with a consistent monthly update schedule) is in my opinion really a LOT for a solo developer.
I can't speak for what he does monthly since I'm not part of his development cycle but I guess he does a fair bit overall, however it's not the typical work hours one would normally have also I'm fairly sure that he has mentioned once before that he has someone else working on this game but maybe that was just temporary or it may have been for the other game, hard to remember when I read it a year ago. Still a full year is a lot of time to only be given like 8 new scenes and some text. Stories are written/typed in-beforehand and with Ren'Py you can just copy and paste that in. What takes the most time in this case would be the sex scenes but even then you render full 3D bodies and "position" them correctly for the scene and then you work on animating them. Even for a solo developer you can have about 18 new scenes with the 'Adventures Lounge' completed in that time and have a sex scene with Karyn which they did dirty and I'm sad because she is by far one the best characters added. I love me some Charlotte and Karyn and if they ever did a scene with those two together my senses would overload.
I'm getting quite sure that we're not talking about the same game here, for 2 reasons:
- I just counted and Ncrow has added at least 26 H scenes to the game in the last 12 months, with a huge amount of lore, several new characters and like 60 non H-scenes on top
- afaik this is his first and only game
- I may be wrong but he has never had any substantial support on the dev side (only a bit of help on character design, music, proofreading)
"Character design, music and proofreading" ...then he isn't going solo like I said and I'm convinced that you are pulling my leg.
As for the scenes, since I have the save files still, I checked and these were added:
Akane: 1
Mayu: 1
Tomoe: 1
Ryoko & Charlotte: 1
Ryoko: 2
Charlotte: 1
Yui: 1
Shika: 1
Hana: 1
Alice: 1
Karyn: 1
Natsuki & Ryoko: 1
Halloween Special: 7
That's a total of 20 scenes not 26 and this is between v.0.2.8 to v.0.3.7 however without the Halloween special (which I would assume was a Patreon thing but I'm talking about the main game specifically) it would be 13 scenes and that's discounting; Adventure's Lounge, Tomoe's shop, Bathhouse, new location and the new mechanic to which he has said in game: "will be added in the next update" more times than I would like to count. I'm not saying that Ncrow should rush the game out but I'm saying that if you say next update to something then you bring it next update, you don't lie and try to milk money out of people and a whole year is an significant amount of time for so little to be updated.
You know who else was a solo developer? ConcernedApe the man behind 'Stardew Valley' which he created in 4 years and that's from scratch. He didn't have help from others nor did he have a special program (like Ren'Py) that would ease his programming and he legit did everything himself. A pixel art game not only takes longer to make but is a lot harder.
EDIT: Also lore/story can be copy and pasted in since you type that first before you even start a game (normally) and the same goes with images and sounds.