I'm sorry this took so long

I recall how an indie developer who focused on engine for a long time started getting called a fraud and a scammer, but when he finally pivoted to focus on content it came really fast and the game grew leaps and bounds. Overall the game ended up a few months behind its original schedule, but given the overall plan covered about 30 months, that seems pretty good. I think more often creators feel they have to add more and more content despite building up tech debt because they have to show progress - honestly, that seems to happen with any small shop - but eventually somewhere in mid game the bill comes due as the scale of effort necessary to add each additional item multiples due to the messiness of the underlying design. To some degree I suspect that’s part of what happened now. The good thing is that where many would throw up their hands and move on to another project or silently sandbag (think Breeding Season), Crush actually updates people on a reasonably frequent schedule, saying what he’s working on, etc. That is the perfect balance in my eyes.

Notalie Portman

Just to add my thoughts / experience to this: you don't necessarily need a public release after every sprint but you should always be working to a demo i.e. literally, a demonstration of the work achieved so you can get feedback at the end of every sprint. This ensures that integration is possible i.e. your work can be included e.g. the new scenes. Personally, I don't want to see a release for every sprint, only when there is a new feature e.g. story progress. But you can and should have a demo for everything!

0.5joker

The team I work in also uses 4 week sprints, I'm not saying sticking to two week sprints is best (although there's a reason it's the most common time period), I'm saying Crush should aim to release after each sprint. If all we're seeing every 2 weeks is a single bug fix, then yes, I would appreciate that update. Then if people are unhappy with how the bug was fixed (see the suntan update) Crush can fix it immediately, rather than 6 months after they changed it where it's not fresh in their mind. That's one of the large benefits of Agile, and one of many reasons you should aim to release/demo as often as possible. With respect to burnout, I'm less likely to be burned out then I am to forget about the project and move on. More to your point though, if the community started getting a bit irked that every update for 6 months straight had no noticeable improvement that's a likely indicator Crush is prioritising less desired features. That's a good thing, because it means its easier for Crush to pivot to what the community wants to see. Putting an "unfinished content" or "beta" flag (nothing fancy, just a text warning at the top of the paragraph would do) would ensure everyone realises its not the finished product yet, but an indicator of where the story is going. 6 months for back end engine work for a project of this nature IS an astronomically large time, I've designed complex websites with dynamic node/react features in less time as a side hobby project - and I'm not a web developer. Naturally I don't know the specifics of this update, and I want to be super impressed with future updates when I see more of it, but my intuition is that it might not have been worth the time commitment. Lastly on the size of the updates, another AIF game I play - Unforgettable Dinner - releases every 4 weeks, it's using full computer generated images, so I imagine the game requires as much work to progress the story as a project that is text based but requires more backend coding work, and every 4 weeks the story moves along by a significant amount. I'm not convinced people would be unsatisfied with rolling updates, unless those updates were focusing on things that just aren't important to people. As I said, the story hasn't moved since mid 2018, we're fast approaching 2 years without anything new after Dubai, and I think getting some regular and immediate feedback on that would help Crush prioritise.

Sprints aren't always two weeks. They're typically 2 to 4 weeks. I'm currently working with a really weird setup that has five week long sprints. And on top of that, twine or no, he just wrote an engine that will enable him to generate a huge variety of content for us in later stages of the game. Content that uses our character, as developed, and gives partners desires and differences. Whether or not that's functioning in Twine, that's a completely custom configuration. Hugely time consuming work. We'll probably never fully notice or understand the user-facing benefits. We'll just accept that this is how the game runs and works and think of "how long that 1.6 update took." Also, regarding releases, if he released every two or even four weeks, we'd burn out fast. Because we'd only see minute changes. There'd be an entire sprint where most of the User Stories were prep work for implementing stuff in the next sprint and maybe a couple hair options got added. Do you really want an update saying "Hey guys, it's been two weeks! Here's your release with change log. They only thing you can see this sprint is that I fixed the boob squish issue! Next sprint you'll be able to put on knee high boots! The one after that we'll actually have new story!" I wouldn't. I'll wait for versions that are ready for User testing.

Hey, relax. You may get some grumbles, but a lot of us are supporting you for the long haul because we like what you're doing and we have patience. We get that building the framework is critical, time consuming, and the end user never really understands the value of it because they can't see it. At least until you start using the improvements to introduce features and functions they can see. Thanks for putting so much time and effort into this. Also, personal opinion here, I hate agile, I hate Jira, and I hate Devops. It works... but my god, sometimes I feel like I just want to work and leave the damn sprint board alone.

I get what you're saying xgrotesc, but this is a Twine game, so there's no barrier to releasing every two weeks. Discord releases updates every few hours, because it's built using a similar HTML framework called Electron. Most games that have more barriers still release every two weeks (take League of Legends for example). They have additional incentives due to things like balance changes, sure, but the best Agile system is one that gets user feedback as soon as possible, and so that means you should release as often as is realistic. It's very common in website development to release after each sprint, and this game is functionally an interactive webpage. And I think releasing after each sprint would help Crush prioritise what's worth working on.

That's not ho agile works. Havng a 2 weeks sprint doesnt't mean a release every 2 weeks. It means goals should be achieve every sprint and the goal may not be a release. I've worked with several projects both in Scrum and Kanban and most times releases only came every 2 or 3 months although the the srpints were always 2 weeks long. I agree that Crush needs to work better on this and that 6 months seems an awful lot of time for this update, but to suggest that since he's working with agile he should have a release ready every 2 weeks is just wrong.

xgrotesc

I totally agree. And to be honest, this new sex engine doesn't seem so revolutionary to me, quite the opposite. In truth, it seems to me the same stuff, more or less.

I've gotta say, this is a very small update for 6 months of work. Delays at the end don't really bother me, people underestimate the amount of work something requires, that happens, don't stress too much about being radio silent for a week. Its what has happened since October that makes less sense to me. If you're employing an 'Agile' development process like you're claiming you should be releasing an update every 2 weeks, when each sprint ends. Even if it's very small. You can then get instant feedback and adjust your development priorities - which is what makes the development process agile. I suspect with an update this small after 6 months you would probably notice almost every update every 2 weeks added no additional content, and you might start to think of adding the content of the game over behind the scenes engine work that I hardly noticed in this update. The story hasn't actually moved since June 2018. And given this was the longest break between updates, I assumed this was going to be the next enormous leap forward and we would actually get some Thailand content. You've got to start giving us some substantive steps forward. At $6k a month you're earning more money from Patreon alone then the average American makes working full-time, and I've seen it as high as $8k in the past. I expect at least a part-time commitment to the project for that kind of support.