Q & A Regarding Kemo Coliseum Project Part 2 (Patreon)

To be honest, I'm glad this person is back with more questions and misunderstanding for me to address since these might be concerns that other people have as well.

First of all, let's start with the comment itself.

That's a pretty long comment, so I'll address it point by point.

First questions weren't from me so I won't bother to respond to them in detail, but playing the victim card in response to criticism, that's the best you can do? Trying to play on emotions by using such words as "abuse", "mental health", "ignorance", "skepticism" and so on - really?

These are words that describe the reality of what is happening. Many comments on the internet are ignorant of the project delays and common issues among software development. These comments do affect the mental health of our staff, with NullGhost being one of those people where his depression got worse whenever someone talked bad about the project.

Also I think any moron knows when Patreon was created, there is more than one way to do math and figure out how much a creator is making, just saying.

I used to believe this too, but apparently people always have a way to surprise you. Some of the rumors are really out of this world. And you're right, there are many ways to figure out how much a creator is making. Yours is wrong though.

What? Lack of funding? For as long as I can remember your "goals" on Patreon have been at "fully achieved" and actually had double the amount of backing you were asking for, so people naturally assumed that you had more than enough funds to work with in order to finish the game in a timely manner.

Patreon's goal system is different from Kickstarter's. I think you are confused by that. The goal system of Patreon is more of a milestone, where if each goal is reached, it's for that specific reward described in the goal. It doesn't mean when the goal is reached, it will be enough for the project to keep on going or finished.

When you said "people naturally assumed that you have more than enough funds to work with", I hope you can see from many comments, especially from the previous Q&A post that this is not the case.

Why didn't you bother to come up with higher goals / rewards to set on Patreon all this time then if the lack of funding has been your "major factor"? Why not a single mention of "Guys we need more support in order to get this done faster!"? In fact I remember a few posts stating that you had enough funds and didn't want to take more. So I call BS on that one

Those posts saying that I have enough money were recent posts. That was
after we determined that we had enough money on Patreon for the main members to reduce their IRL working hours in order to spend more time on Kemo Coliseum.

There are many reasons why we didn't ask for more money or set a higher goal, some of them are as follows:

• It's too much of a risk to promise something unpredictable. Hiring more people is complicated, and a wrong hire could delay or even ruin a project. Making this mistake while getting even more money from supporters is the pressure that we don't need right now.
  
  What if we can't find anyone? If we promise in the goal that we'll use this money to hire people, will there be people who think we're scammers and don't intend to hire anyone and only spend the money on ourselves? The list goes on, and we feel like we'd rather work on the game for now.
  
• People were already attacking us, wrongly estimating how much money we've made. One even multiplied the amount of money/update by all the posts we've ever made on Patreon, not knowing that some posts are free. To be honest, asking for more money would just be adding fuel to the fire and give us more stress.

It's true that with more money, we could make the game at a faster speed, but that comes with the risk of having to manage more people as well. We discussed this a lot among the team, and we've come to the conclusion that, for now, we don't want to spend time on hiring. And we didn't feel like we have to beg for more money. The money we're getting now is enough for us to get by, while working on the game at a steady pace.

2) "I really don't know where this estimation come from."
Says he as he posts a screenshot with $165.610. As if that's supposed to prove how far off my original estimate was? Don't worry guys, they just need a year or two more to hit those higher numbers!

The number I posted was taken from what Patreon reported to me. Your estimation was wrong, and painted a wrong picture, implying that we've received as much as $500,000. I believe it is also not fair to say that your number will eventually be right, implying that by the time your number is right, the game will still be in the same state as it is today.

3) "So, $165,610 during 4 years. That's $41,402 a year, which is... less than half of an average salary for a Unity Developer."
First of all... in what country? In the US it's $83K but you're not in the US so why are you using US salaries for reference? Misleading on purpose? Wanting to seem like more of a victim? In Japan it's $57K.

Considering you forgot that $41,402/year is what we made for a three member team, I'll go ahead and divide that number by 4 for you, since we don't even get 1/3rd of that as we save one portion for the game assets and hiring other people. That'd be around $10,350.50/year. So that's less than 20% of what a game programmer in Japan can make.

Please feel free to use any other countries as a reference on your own, as I'm sure that this amount will be considered underpaid in most countries.

Second... so you expect a full time US salary just for working on this furry porn project? What? Can I have that kind of a job? Where do I apply??

And here lies the difference in our core values. Just because the game contains adult and furry content, you devalue it and underestimate the amount of work and time that the game's development requires.

You can take any existing game and replace the text and graphics with furry content, but the complexity of the project and the amount of work on the game wouldn't necessarily be much less than before.

I stated this not because I expect a full time US salary for working on this, but to show how silly the idea of doing this as some kind of elaborate scam really is.

...also, wait, almost full time since 2016, so 2+ years and you still haven't been able to finish one episode of the game? Not even with rough sketches instead of full-color drawings?

This is false. We have released two complete episodes during those years.

Here's the announcement of us releasing the 1st episode with fully colored punishment scene in 2016

Here's another announcement of us releasing the 2nd episode in 2017, with fully colored erotic CGs.

5) "Splitting the game into episodes is already our way of trying to make us releasing the game faster. And now we're even going further to release an update for each main quest. It's still going to take time because that's how the game works." ...because that's how the game works? Yeah, get it now guys? That's how the game works! Nothing more to discuss here, everyone go home now.

Actually, yes, that is how it works. This is nothing new, as there's even an article about this on Kotaku since 2017 going into details on why game development can take so long even for a simple 2D game. Or you can ask any software developer, really, since this isn't a unique problem to game development, but more of a problem with software engineering in general.

Game development may have it worse as developers need to try to nail the "fun factor" in addition to having a working product, and you often don't know whether your game is fun or not until it's playable in some form which may lead to more revisions that were originally unplanned.

I used to actually like this project a lot and was rooting for it to be finished ASAP, I backed it myself back in 2015... but I very soon realized that something was off and it was unlikely for it to be done anytime soon due to all the neverending delays and excuses, so I quit, as did some of my other friends. It was frustrating for me to see my own prediction come to life, witnessing the painfully slow progress over the last 3 years and a truckload of new excuses and delays. I feel cheated by having supported you in the first place and by having advertised this game to all my friends as well as on some boards online. I was genuinely excited to see it come to life... but as time went on, month after month, year after year, and it still wasn't even halfway done I've just had enough. You lost my trust, and trust of many other people online. At this point it just seems like you're more interested in releasing those endless "reports with teasers" that everyone is tired of instead of finishing the actual game and releasing new builds... like everyone else who works on visual novels does. They release playable builds, not mere reports of "what has been done and redone a dozen times over again even though nobody asked for it".

I'm sorry you felt that way. However, I don't know what else to say other than this is the reality of game development. Seeing that you still think of Kemo Coliseum as a "visual novel", ignoring all the other complex systems in the game that visual novels lack, there is nothing that I can do.

I'm happy to hear that you helped support the project in its early days on Patreon, and that you promoted the game to your friends and other forums. I hope that once the game is finished, you'll get to play it and understand that this is something we truly want to work on.

In the mean time, I believe this should be the last exchange between us, as I also want to focus my time on the game.

- Punipen

Edited Log
2018-10-05 - Removed the commenter's name.