I love the game, but the slow progress is really troublesome. The last chapter was released Dec 7th '23 and the latest release came out yesterday. The length and content of chapter 6 after a 90 day plus wait is too little and too short...
Chapter 6 came out on the 23rd – exactly 4 months after Chapter 5. Our monthly subscribers get it 7 days early as per our early-access model.
Chapter 6 is the second largest chapter of the game, so it's the furthest thing from short. Keep in mind this is a "harem" game, so if you're rejecting girls or glossing over their big scenes, updates will seem shorter.
As a developer of this game I can say that getting the chapter done in 4 months was no easy feat, considering the level of polish and production quality the game has. Sure, we could throw out a scuffed/half-assed version in 3 months. Sure, there's some developers who have entire teams behind them who get it done faster. But for Radiant, we're a 2-man team and we need our players to understand that these things do take time to create – we can't just wave a magic wand and have it done.
Also, if you compare the playtime-length of our game updates vs. the amount of months Ch6 took, I think you'll find that we're right in-line, schedule wise, with the overwhelming majority of games and their own update speeds... some of which are far less polished or have far less emphasis on production quality.
Thanks for reading.
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I want to expand on the above a bit more for the sake of clarity, for those who care to read further.
What I can say as the person who writes the story, does the coding and overall game design etc... is that the scripts alone take literal months to finish. I can produce about 3 out of 20 (average chapter scene#) scenes on a really good week, but some scenes are much larger than others and take about 1 full week alone when considering choices/branching. So if we say an average of a half-week per scene (which is a generous estimate), that means I need around 10 weeks just to revise and finish writing the game's scripts (or a total of 2.5 months)... and that's a fairly low approximation, since like I said they can take even longer.
When you add the wait for renders and animations, the time it takes to code, test, and properly polish the updates, the regular communication I have to keep with our supporters over on SS and Patreon, and other extenuating circumstances... 4 months is not unreasonable at all.
No need to apologize, and hopefully my response to you didn't come off as hostile or impatient. I actually really appreciate the feedback.
I play the games myself as well, so I know how much it sucks to have to wait for them. Some of my favorite games release rather short (25-40 minute) updates every 3 months or so, and it always feels bad when reaching the end. On the other side, some of them release really long updates... but only about once every year. This also sucks. We are trying to settle somewhere right in the middle of that for Radiant.
I'm glad you like the game and hope you continue to enjoy it, we're going to do our absolute best to stick to that 4 month update schedule. Just a heads up though, Ch7's release date is August 20th, since my co-dev needs to go visit family out of country for 3 weeks in June (we added 2 weeks to our deadline to be safe).