I think people severely underestimate what the final game is supposed to be. I think most people think it's "Current game + more content and animations" IT IS NOT THAT. And I'm sorry if I made people think that with the preview and current versions of the game. The versions that have come here ARE early development versions, if the game as it was now, was how it's supposed to be it would be on steam already. But it's not.
The builds coming to patreon and SS are LESS playable than even current releases. Cause they're even more early development.
There's no new content in these releases, there's a function I want people to try and give bug reports on. Thats about it. You can find 3.1 on patreon open free for everyone, it was an accident but because it's been so long I decided to quietly leave it.
And then you play it and find that you have to buy every single store item in a store with no store icons before you can play the game, that's annoying. I don't want people on itch to have to deal with that. And the reason it's like that is to show the store working and get reports on glitches.
Now you might ask "well why not fix that and just release it here" Thats not the only issue, there's many other experimental features and functions that are half implemented. And spending time making those things work for a broader release is not a good use of development time, and I'm saying that knowing it's been a year since the last update. It's better to move on, finish other aspects cause it's not like there's content to play. I spend potentially a couple weeks ironing out bugs to get the release out for NO ADDITIONAL CONTENT.
It's not worth it.
As for your version comments, I follow a similar ruleset, BUT it's also based on internal information. Like what's the progress of the story writing, what internal features are functional, etc. It doesn't mean it's playable. Also 1.0.0 is when the game is finished, not stable, that's not the steam release, steam release will be like 0.5.0 cause it will be still early access. The game is 1.0.0 when the game is playable from beginning to end, we are no where near that, and maybe next update will make that clearer.
Understand what I mean by stable I mean playable, where you can enjoy the game and play content and not have to deal with the game soft locking or breaking. I don't want someone to sit down feel like playing Our Apartment and then their game updated to a shittier version that's broken with a bunch of confusing new UI stuff.
Look I get it, it's frustrating to wait, you're entitled to updates which you WILL get. And when that happens, and when the game has progressed to the standards promised in the preview you'll be a happy customer. But I know that until then it's going to be an annoying wait cause there's nothing much more I can do. I am one person, making a fairly ambitious project but also trying to do it properly. It will take time.
You spent $10, thank you, I appreciate it. I make every development post on patreon/SS public for people like you. But what I don't want is a reputation for buggy broken releases, I've seen what that looks like. I've had people pissed off playing pirated versions, of development builds.
I would rather have a reputation for being insanely slow.