Hey, I’m sorry you feel that way. I’m going to preface this entire post by saying this. I understand that it’s hard to glean emotion through internet posts. So I want to say right now, I’m not angry, or upset or anything like that. That said, if I can be frank here, I’m one person. I hired on two freelancers to do the art and the music for this game, but outside of that I have everything on my plate. I’m not sure if you develop games yourself. If you do I’m sure you understand how much of an undertaking they are. Being a solo developer is quite literally a full time job, as I’m sure many others on this site would agree. Not to mention having to handle social media on top of it.
That said the wiki has fallen low on my priority list. As you mentioned there are plenty of bugs to fix and features to add. My goal as a game developer is to develop a game, not a wiki. I’d be happy to work on it given time. Forgive me, but when it was started, and maybe I misunderstood, I believe I was told that it would be up to fans to fill in most of the content. It was my job to watch, moderate and perhaps add content myself from time to time, not make the entire site myself. Again, not trying to be mean here, but you also started the wiki yourself, then abandoned it a week later saying you had other things to work on. I don’t know that you can call me out for not working on it now after dropping it yourself.
As for Enchanted Portals, I’d honestly never heard of it until you mentioned it. I’m not an expert, but I’m pretty sure that game got flak because it is an extremely obvious clone. Based on the trailer it seems to have literally copied every aspect of Cuphead. The art style, gameplay, level design, music, everything seems to be lifted entirely from Cuphead. Except from what I can tell the animation doesn’t look like it was painstakingly hand drawn so it’s almost a bit insulting. When you copy things that directly you should probably expect backlash.
Now I’m not going to sit here and tell you that there aren’t similarities between Verdant Village and Stardew Valley. There are, obviously. If you really want to pursue that argument I would say that Stardew Valley is a ripoff of Harvest Moon. Not that I’m trying to put down Stardew, because it’s great. The point is that this is a genre of games, they are going to be similar. With time I plan to differentiate Verdant Village from Stardew Valley as best I can, but at the end of the day a lot of ideas will overlap, that’s just the nature of games in the same genre.
As for adding more meaningful updates. Yes, I’m aware. As the store page says the game is in alpha and missing many things. It’s the main reason why it’s free, because I wouldn’t expect anyone to pay for a bare bones game. As of this version I even retracted the patching system because it was causing issues rather than helping. On top of that tracking down the issues it was causing was cutting into the development of new things massively. Point is, I’m working on getting things in as fast as possible. There’s a fine line between adding content regularly and rushing out half finished junk. This isn’t a race, at least not for me. I’d rather take things at a reasonable pace and think through my decisions. If the game spends more time in alpha because of that, then so be it.
Like I said at the beginning of this I don’t mean any of this to sound rude. I just wanted to more thoroughly explain things from my perspective. In closing, thanks for your concern. I agree, there’s lot’s of stuff to do. With any luck there will be more additions to the game soon.