Quote Originally Posted by Eversor86 View Post
Question is, if they will get things out before game is dead.

5 people is not enough to do things at a fast pace? I hope that was sarcasm or something ;]. If there really is well 4 - cause I don't count the PR guy as a dev team - guys running this game - then they, like I said, do it as a hobby 1h a week, or work full time on it doing less work than half a person could do.
The amount of people doesn't really say a lot. For speed they would need proper management to direct them, which is what caused them to leave the place they worked at before to begin with. They are essentially running around without a head, not having a clue as to how to organize themselves... And let's not forget that while there are 4 people working on the game, they don't all have the same skills, and certain skills are needed more often. They are lacking some important skills entirely, like the ability to balance a game (which is entirely different from being able to program a game, unfortunately) or managing a team. There can be a dozen people working on something, but without the required skills to do it properly it's nothing more than trial and error. There have been indie games with small teams, but those have been hit or miss depending on the skills they had. Sometimes their only source of proper feedback on certain aspects is from the players, which could easily result in broken balance or flawed mechanics until patching happens (case in point, Binding of Isaac, the dev never learned how balance works despite popularity and a massive increase in team size for the remake).

Back to this games team, Kinkoid. There is only one person who knows how to program game mechanics (but he doesn't know how to balance them), there is only one person who knows how interfaces work (who doesn't know how to include options because that's the programmers field), there is only one person who can draw and there is only one person who can write (at a level that's barely above fanfiction, though that may be due to the translation quality)... None of them know anything about the others fields, so if one gets stuck on something they all get stuck once their existing workload runs out. A lot of this game depends on the artist in the end, and only one of them can do that job. However, every other member significantly increases the artists workload. Imagine if the writer decided to change a scene, then suddenly the artists work for the previous version of the scene would be partially invalidated. The designer and developer have nothing to do unless they think of a new feature to add or improve, and once they do it would require resources from the artist again (and that seems to happen often). Without proper management, it's impossible to control these situations, and as such it results in significant delays because the artist is getting overworked.

It wouldn't be an understatement to say that for every hour of non-artist work, you need to do 1,5 hours of artist work when a game is almost fully based on its art (like this one, where there isn't a single part that doesn't have any art in it), which creates a significant bottleneck on their teams performance, and the monthly events add even more work for the artist. They would do best to get a second artist and spread the workload a bit more, but that creates other complications without someone with management skills. You actually get a lot of similar issue with fan projects involving a team of 3-10 people, which is why it doesn't surprise me. For a game like this, I would try to have at least 3 artists (one with focus on story, one with focus on girls and one with focus on backgrounds and events), 1 programmer, 1 tester (mainly dedicated to testing new content and balancing), 2 writers (each acts as the editor for the other), 1 designer and 1 manager to steer people in the right direction. That is what would be required to keep up the work at a steady pace while also ensuring quality. For this game's size and scope it's quite understaffed as it is now (especially because there is only 1 person who can make the art), and that results in a low production rate.

Currently, the artists backlog for existing content is about: 2 scenes for ~80 girls, updated versions of some tutorial scenes in world 2 and 3, updated art for older girls. Work for upcoming stuff is mainly based around the events, which is going to be 6 girls with 5 scenes each per month. Assuming they want to get good quality art out rather than rushed stuff, and that's a lot of hours to work on the art for that... That doesn't even include upcoming story, event backgrounds, event versions of the bosses, new features or even the background and world map changes for the next area. A single fully colored image of reasonable quality can easily take a day or more to make, which is also why many artists (who do it for a living rather than a hobby) have a rather high per image commission fee, and amount of time that assumes the image isn't scrapped or rejected for whatever reason (low quality, broken anatomy, changed script, etc). A single story scene has dozens of images. This is why they need more artists to keep the pace up.

And the reason they can use a parody version of a character is simple, the trademarked characters are generally rather specific and a high degree of likeliness is required before it's an issue. They can do it as long as there are some changes to the basic design, so it isn't a match anymore, and at worst it counts as a parody rather than infringement. This is also why Hasbro fails to shut down certain types of non-family friendly MLP fanart, despite really wanting to... Even Disney failed on numerous occasions despite really trying, and most other companies don't even bother trying anymore unless it's a very close match, and even then it's often just not worth it for them because there aren't any real damages from it.