Poll #8 Results and Discussing Full Development

I'll get to the poll results farther down, but I wanted to discuss a change in development first.

I was starting to put together the next poll when I realized something is holding back development on Waifu Wonderland considerably. It's causing there to be delays and is making it so that less content gets added. It's even limiting what I can do with the game. I'll explain.

The next poll was going to be an opinion poll seeing what kind of update schedule people liked the most. The options were monthly, bi-monthly, and every 6 weeks. As I outlined each of the options, I talked about how much time I spend updating the game and how that affects dev time. Basically, more frequent releases mean less time spent actually developing the game.
Whenever I do a release, that takes up around a week of time away from development. Since first I need to test as best as I can to make sure nothing is super broken, which takes longer and longer as the game gets bigger. I always try to test for at least 3 days, but ideally I try to do at least 5 leading up to the release. I always try to test with both an existing save and then a new save to try and test as many scenarios as possible.
Then once that's done I need to pack both versions for distributing. Then I have to update various threads promoting the project, as well as upload the projects to various mirrors. This generally takes 2 days to do. Then I have to wait and see if anything is super broken and needs a quick fix, which seems to happen almost every release. The most recent one had a bug where if you lost to Almiranda in the lab intro, her scene would stay on screen. When that happens, I have to fix the problem and reupload everything and edit all of the sites hosting the game. I also try to answer more pertinent questions about the game for at least a couple of days to help keep threads higher on recent lists to further help promote the game.
So, for every release I generally take around 7-10 days not being able to actually work on the game. Doing monthly releases, that means that 1/4 of my time spent working on the game, isn't actually spend developing. Which is a LOT of time to spend. For context, there's 52 weeks in a year, and with a monthly schedule that means I'm only actually working on the game for 40 out of 52 weeks. That's an extra 3 full updates worth of content I'm not able to do.

So I thought that it would be better to start doing bi-monthly updates, and not do the poll. It would be a more effective use of time and I'd be able to get more done. But then I realized something pretty important, I didn't take into consideration the time spent making posts on Patreon.
Ignoring releases, I make a post once a week. These posts take 1-2 days for me to put together. And I generally don't work on the game those days. Since it's not just typing things out, I also have to come up with ideas for posts and polls and put together various kinds of assets and topics to discuss. Things like putting together graphics for poll results, any sketches or public versions of artwork needed, or now renders needed for 3D characters.
As I've mentioned before, I also have arthritis, and typing a lot is what irritates my hands the most. By the time I'm done not just coming up with ideas and putting together assets needed with these posts, but then also typing them out, my hands hurt too much to do anything else for the rest of the day.
So I factored those days into lost development time too. With an average of 1.5 days per week spent on posting, that means I'm losing 6 days a month. Which is basically a week. Even doing bi-monthly updates, running this patreon means I'm only able to actually work on the game for about 34 out of 52 weeks a year. That's only a little over half. And at this point, I've done mostly monthly releases, so really it's at 28 out of 52 weeks.

For many games, this kind of time investment is worth it, or not as much of an issue. Since it may be run by a team with a dedicated social media manager or at the very least there's multiple people in the team so while one person is posting the others can still work. Many games also unfortunately don't really care about making a finished product or having a work schedule.
More importantly, for many games, they're making hundreds, if not thousands or even tens of thousands, of dollars a month. But none of this is the case for Waifu Wonderland. I'm just one person and the game is currently sitting at $41 a month. Out of curiosity, I calculated how much I make per hour with that amount each month. And it's roughly $0.26 per hour. Which is absurdly low.
The last part of this equation is the number of people actually playing the game. Based on tracked downloads and plays, the game has gotten roughly 100,000 plays across all versions now. The patreon currently has 10 paid supporters. That's a conversion rate of 0.01% from players to patrons. And from what I've read, an average conversion rate is around 1%. Even considering that half of the downloads/plays are from people returning for version updates, that's still only 0.02%. Even at 75% of downloads being returning players it's only a 0.04% conversion rate. Abysmal all around.

On top of all of that, I went back and estimated how long it would take to get through all of the needed content, and if I keep going as is, I'll be moved before I could finish everything. Which would leave the game potentially dead and abandoned. And I really don't want that. I want to make sure the game is in a relatively finished state before I go.

With all of this in mind, it's clear to see that the game has failed to find support and running this Patreon is hurting more than helping.

So after a lot of consideration, I've decided to move into full development and focus on working on the full retail version, instead of distributing the game for free and hoping to get support. Outside of a very select few, that 0.01%, the adult piracy community clearly has no intention of supporting the game.

That being said, I'll be doing one more release here before working on finishing the retail version of the game. That way I can add in the promised collectable content and content cut out of v0.2.1. I'll also be giving anyone who supported the game and gave more than what the game costs a free key once the full game releases. I don't know how much I'll be charging for it yet, I need to do some research first.

The last patreon release is just to include the new scenes for the starters and the working girls and then 3D collectables. I only plan on releasing that here for patrons, as a thanks to those who have supported the game. That should be releasing around the end of the month for early access supporters, then releasing to other tiers at the normal times. However it may take a little longer, since my day job has been insane lately and I haven't had time to work on anything. Anyway, from there, the game will release once it's done onto steam. I'll likely do an Itch release as well, but I've heard that all io sites are going to be shut down. Not sure how reliable that information is, but on the off chance that it is true, I'm not really sure if itch will exist soon. I was only planning on doing one version for the steam release, to prevent confusion, so if itch goes down, then unfortunately I wont have a way to distribute the blacked version anymore.

It also may sound like a big deal, but really, doing this just means that I should be able to get the game out by December like I had initially wanted to. Which would mean about 2 months from the last patreon release. I'd really like to stress that I'm doing this because it's what's best for the game. Now the game will be out in a timely manner. The game is effectively entering full production after going through the proof of concept and then an alpha and then a beta stage.

I'll be leaving the patreon up for those that still would like to help support the game/effectively pre-order, as well as for those that want the various insights into development that I've discussed in various posts. I've always wanted to be as transparent and up-front as possible, so I mainly went into all of this detail so people would understand my reasoning and why I'm not updating regularly anymore. Otherwise it may look like I suddenly abandoned the game. Which isn't the case. Running the Patreon is just hurting the actual development of the game.

One last thing I'd like to now, is that I will still honor all of the previous Patreon goals. If somehow the game gets to 50 paid patrons or $200 before the retail release, I'll still keep developing and add in the house tier. I'll start posting and doing polls and everything again if that happens too. Since at that point, it would be worth the time investment to do at least monthly polls and posts.

Poll Results -

And now for the final poll results! I ended up ending it a couple days early to be able to get through this post faster. It hadn't had any new votes in about a week and had 178 views, then patreon also flagged the post for some reason. 178 views is more than the total patrons here, so I thought it was fair to assume everyone who was going to vote already voted.

Anyway, let's take a look at the results!

• 1) By a pretty big margin, Rinko was the first winner. I was honestly really shocked to see her not only win, but end up being the most popular by far. Rinko didn't do well when I posted her on pixiv and didn't do well in the past character poll, so I really didn't expect her to get many votes. I'm definitely glad she did though! She's one of my personal favorite characters and I'm glad that I'm able to give her another scene and implement pregnancy for her.

• The second place winner ended up being Freya. With just two raw votes, but with weights she landed in second place!

• The last there's... a tie between Aoyagi and Hitomi. I wasn't sure what to do about a tie, since I never expected a tie to happen. I decided that the fairest way to break the tie would be to go to raw votes, and since Hitomi only got one raw vote and Aoyagi got four, Aoyagi is the winner!

The new outfits and scenes will be added into the full version of the game!

Thank you to everyone who has supported the game up to this point! I don't think I would have had the motivation to keep going without you! I hope you look forward to the full release of Waifu Wonderland!