Keep in mind that there is a discord server you can join and communicate with Kal. Though as he is a solo developer his main focus is on creating games, so he obviously does not have the time or resources to talk to every single person while he is creating. There is no community manager for Arvus Games but the mods feedback everything to Kal so it does not fall on deaf ears. Kal obviously cares about the voice of the players, that is apparent by the number of changes that have been made to the game raised in this thread already. Even if the game was funded by the community during development, there would still be limitations on the time Kal could spend on engaging the player base, it would mainly just increase the scope and functionality of the game. Not forgetting Starmaker is a side project and not the main focus for Arvus Games...
I know… I truly love this game and sincerely hope it can get better. In short, I really wish the creator would push out more updates, but since the game is free, I feel awkward urging updates as a player — it would be really shameless of me to keep pestering for updates for a free game.
For instance, if the game could generate over one million US dollars in revenue, developing it would turn into a full-time career. We’ve discussed so much purely because players are huge fans of this game. Personally speaking, we wouldn’t mind paying for the game at all! This is just my personal thought.
With sufficient motivation, such as ample profits or other driving forces, more goals can be achieved, more staff can be recruited, and this side hustle can become a main business. That’s all I want to express. I have full respect for the creator’s capability and passion for this work. If there were enough manpower and steady high income, the claim that KAL lacks enough time to communicate with players would no longer stand true.
The core problem is that the current revenue cannot sustain smooth development. Besides, updating progress updates never take much time and energy anyway.
SpencerSummer mentioned he wants to support the creator, yet the development progress is always unclear, so he hopes for more frequent communication.I don’t think this is the same as what others said about KAL having limited time for player interaction.
Simply typing a short note like "Current progress: 80%" takes barely any time at all.
This brings us back to the original point. If the game brought in impressive earnings — say ten thousand US dollars per day — you would definitely interact with players every single day, and even be eager to chat with every gamer, wouldn’t he?
(This is AI-translated, so it may not fully convey my exact thoughts. My ultimate wish is for the creator to polish this game into a better work. All players are fully supportive, and we are totally okay with paid versions. That’s all I want to say.)
Very few NSFW developers are brining in that kind of money, sure there are outliers such as HuniePot and some Kagura Games developers. Though even with that type of budget that does not do much for the feedback loop, sure these games have community managers, but the developers are still pretty rock solid about their scope and ambition.
Could Arvus Games join that band of a few, sure Starmaker has the potential as an IP, but throwing money at it is still not going to resolve any issues. Increasing the development resources only works if people with the same focus and ambition join the team. Not to mention upskilling them would require delays in the development cycle. Some of these games only work the way they do because they are one man bands, as soon as you add others into the equation it becomes a mess.
That being said, I have mentioned for a while and I still think Kal taking on Dr.Muramasa full time as a Community Manager/QA/Artist would resolve a lot of these issues with release management, feedback, game quality and the speed of updates.. but who am I to say ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Just seems like a no brainer.