itch.io

I also appreciate your viewpoint, and similarly I also do not share it. Like I said, everyone is free to do as they please. I don't and shouldn't have the right to tell you what to do, even though I deeply disagree with your position. However, I feel it is important to have transparent discussions about these issues.

My question for you is this: Why isn't your game free? Why are you paywalling further updates through your patreon, instead of sharing everything?

I've seen lots of popular VNs start with sparse art and placeholder backgrounds that became really successful, and afterwards had the funds to hire artists to flesh out their visuals. To this day, all of them remain free on itch and still provide free updates. Why isn't your game free for everyone?

Now, you're probably thinking it's insanely entitled of a stranger to ask you to put all your hard work, that you spent so much of your precious free time on, up for free on the internet. It's yours so you should get to decide what you do with it, right? You have a right to profit off your own work, right?

I agree. The people whose art got stolen for you to use, didn't get to profit off their own work though. If the idea of me demanding you give me and everyone on the internet all your hard work for free bothers you, I encourage you to ask yourself why it doesn't bother you that you're using the free, stolen, scraped art of millions of artists who, unlike you, never got a choice in getting paid or not. They just got their hard work ripped from their hands to watch someone else profit off it. Right now, that someone else is you.

You are supporting corporations who are getting rich off of art they thoughtlessly stole. You are using their product for free (or worse, paying them) to have free access to, essentially, the art of so many people like you, who got unceremoniously robbed of their own art. And, considering you are a writer and creative, and claim to also be a visual artist, I find it really sad that you would sink to this level because I feel like people who create things should have solidarity with each other. 

That's all. 

It is a problem.  I have been intentionally not buying games that use AI assets.  --But a lot of those games are low effort too.  Like the dozens of AI pinball tables Zaccaria pinball has been spewing out over the last couple of months.

I can definitely see the effort put into your story and the gameplay and they really draw me in.  I wish you didn't need art at all really, but though I personally have bought a number of interaction fiction games that have little or no art, I know most people expect that, and some of your minigames require art.

You seem to be quite good with photoshop.  What do you think about starting with public domain pictures  kind of like Four Last Things and The Procession to Calvary, which are very visually striking and fit the time period you're going for?