That demo really made my retro senses itch like crazy so I was almost throwing my money at you - but then I read with dread that it's only a partial release. Now I made some bad experiences with games (particularly adventures) that had the plan to be released in multiple slices. Most of them never got far over the first episodes and got stuck forever. In addition, the last adventure that was planned to be released in six or seven chapters was Foxtails which, unfortunately, even after many years still is on chapter 3. There are positive examples too, of course - the brillant The Journey Down got its three chapters released fairly quickly for example. How do you plan to release the chapters? If a chapter will take roughly a year I could be dead before the full game's seven chapters are released. ;)
Hello Athanasius,
First of all I would like to apologise for my late reply, I completely overlooked your comment!
I can understand if someone wants to wait and see and doesn't want to buy and play episode by episode. Personally, it's very important to me to tell the story of A Twisted Tale the way I want it to be told and to include everything I want to include. As a solo dev, this also means a lot of work and therefore a lot of time (and money) that goes into it.
I decided to release the game episodically so that the community has the opportunity to contribute their ideas and actively participate in the design of the game - but also so that people don't have to wait forever for me to finish the game. Of course, funding also plays a role that should not be underestimated, as the voice overs in German and English are extremely cost-intensive.
Of course there's never a guarantee, and there wouldn't be one if I locked myself in and didn't want to publish the 7 chapters until the end (without voice over), because something could happen to me in the meantime. But I really enjoy bringing the story to life and love working on it. I'm making the game because I want to make the game and I enjoy it. And I think that's a good motivation.
Chapter 1 took me quite a long time, as I had no previous experience and had to learn a lot first. I had never made a game before, worked with the engine, never created a frame-by-frame animation - there were a lot of things I had to learn the hard way, which took a lot of time. Nevertheless, I worked on the game every evening. I didn't play a single game myself during that time, and I didn't watch all these great TV series.
In future, I want to find a little balance between full-evening developments and little breaks for myself. I can't and don't want to estimate in advance exactly how long a chapter will take, because it's important to me that the chapters are really enjoyable and as polished as possible. Feel free to hop on the game's Discord channel, follow me on Twitter or keep an eye on the Kickstarter updates, where I regularly post insights into the current state of development.
I hope I've been able to answer your questions somehow, feel free to ask me more if anything is unclear.
Thank you very much for your feedback,
greetings from Germany,
Eva