Really loved the writing in the demo! I just need Arden and Lorelai to have character art too. Side note, I wish in the Kickstarter there would have been a mention about Mikeal having they/them pronouns. It's fine if they have them but I can see someone backing it without playing the demo, thinking everyone will be having he/him pronouns like in a lot of otome games mostly aimed at a female audience and being upset they weren't warned in advance. 
Thank you for the feedback!
We wish we could afford more character art in our games but it's very costly and we're paying for most of the development out of pocket right now. We're atypical from other indie developers in that we're a tiny team of three women working on our games full-time without another source of income. So currently, we're unfortunately not even making minimum wage across the team and are paying for things out of pocket to afford creating our games right now 💀 Because of that, we have to scope down our projects to fit our budget to make sure we can keep our doors open as a studio, hence the decision to not illustrate Arden and Lorelei since they're side characters and they won't show up in many scenes after the intro. We could add them as a stretch goal though if enough people express interest!
Thank you for sharing your thoughts about Mikael's preferred pronouns! We'll update our Kickstarter to include their pronouns in their character profiles :)
When you say you’re a team of three, does that mean none of you are the artist? Are you outsourcing that part? Otherwise, I’m not seeing what makes it costly. I do all my own art and writing. It takes a lot of time, but it’s otherwise free.
Cuz, seriously, yo, with the description on Arden, he should not only get his own sprite, but should be a romanceable DLC or a stretch goal.
Respectfully, game dev is not free - especially not for our indie team as we officially operate as a company because we have investors on our cap table. Every hour spent on game dev should be compensated as our employees are on W2s. The reason why we say we're not making minimum wage is because our Director and one part-time intern are doing uncompensated work and living off of savings as we're bootstrapping the business as much as possible to retain operational freedom. We're atypical from other indie otome studios in that not only do we operate as a company, but also our employees work on this full-time. It's not a part-time hobby for our team so game dev is not free. Our employees need to make wages to afford cost of living since they're working on this fulltime.
Also, if you've played the demo in full for all scene possibilities, Arden doesn't show up in other demo scenes outside of the intro scene and two other scenes. The demo has a total of 14 scenes for the demo. The full game is planned for around 44+ with similar treatment in that he doesn't show up often, so Arden is really an NPC in the entire context of the game.
The funny thing about beginning something with ‘respectfully’ is that it never sounds that way. It comes off as testy and defensive, but I get what you’re saying. I thought for sure you would catch the tongue-in-cheek tone of my comment about Arden, but that’s the trouble with text - it’s easy to misinterpret people’s intentions. Regardless, it sounds like you’re a bit bigger than the ‘three ladies in Ann Arbor’ description.
And, no, sorry. I didn’t play every single option in the demo, primarily because I can’t download it. My internet connection is spotty, so I prefer to download demos and play offline whenever I can. For the ‘only in browser’ stuff, it’s just a matter of time until a hiccup makes me have to refresh the page and I lose all my progress. I did back the KS, though, so I’ll get to play the whole thing eventually.
Thanks for the follow-up message! You're right that it's hard to read tone for text comments, we definitely missed the tongue-in-cheek since we actually get the question often about why we can't have more features/assets in our games 😅 It's unfortunate to hear that our use of "respectfully" came off as testy and defensive because that was not our intention. For us, we thought we were stating unemotional facts of how we operate. From our perspective, it could've been misread even if we didn't include the word "respectfully" 🙈 So in attempts to avoid misinterpreting text, we're trying to use emojis this time to help convey tone 😆
In regards to being bigger than our description, we're not sure how that interpretation came about? 😵💫 Our studio is a team of only three women working on our games full-time and we show our office space & faces in behind-the-scenes content we release. While we do rotate in and out 1-2 interns during key periods like paid summer internships with a local university, they're not full-time employees though. Either way, we mentioned the financial situation because we hope it helps explain why we scope our games the way we do because of our employees being on W2s. Factoring in cost of living for the number of people we have on our team, one can do a back of the envelope estimate of how much it costs to make a game - which one can see that a $10-13K Kickstarter won't even cover minimum wage for our team’s project that started development since 2023 😅
Anyways, we appreciate you backing the Kickstarter! ✨ It makes sense why you prefer downloading demos given your internet situation!
This has probably been brought up before, but why not ask for more in the KS? It’s seemed like you get enough backing for it. Is it the risk of not getting it funded? You don’t ask for nearly as much money to fund your projects as most other game developers do, but it seems to me like you’re worth a lot more than you’re asking for.