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The biggest issues with the development of PAL is the management of the project. They keep admitting that progress is slow... but why is it slow? Granted, this is a free game, and people are working on this just for fun... But when I work on "just for fun" projects, I'm way more into it than other work! Willing to work nights and weekends because the work itself is fun. I strongly suspect that this isn't fun at all for the people working on it.
Do you remember how we waited a year for the proto-battle system? Do you remember how we waited a year for free exploration? Do you remember how buggy these things were? This isn't the work of strongly motivated people. This is the work of people who waited until the last moment because they didn't want to work on it.
Now, I'm not going to pretend I know why the game isn't fun to work on. It's just clear from the actions of the people working on it that they aren't filled with passion for this anymore.
But then again, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they really have spent the past three years aggressively writing the heck out of the game. But then shouldn't something have happened when they cut the scope of the game from 3 years to just one? And then there's the most troubling sign that nothing is happening: the lead artist's isn't doing livestreams on twitch anymore. That was our one way to support the game... and our only real proof that the game was being worked on, at all. Sure, it's easy to say that they're working on behind the scenes stuff... but anyone who has seen the Spoony Experiment, we all know this can be code for "I'm not doing anything"... but it's trickier than that.
When the site went down, and when it went back up, we were told "why would we bother doing that if the game was dead?" I can tell you why: the devs believe what they're saying. They believe that this has just been three years of hiccups. They believe that if they just keep going, the game will be fully released when it's ready. But that's just not how the world works. It's no different than the person who says that they'll clean their room tomorrow. They say it to get people off their back, and when they say it, they can really mean it. But tomorrow comes, and the room doesn't get clean.
I don't think this game is beyond saving. There's still time to turn this around. There's one thing that can fix all of this: accountability. Deadlines are the worst, but they are necessary to get people motivated to get stuff done. When you have an infinite amount of time to do something, it will take an infinite amount of time to get it done. Even if deadlines are arbitrary, they still work. Why don't we try something? It's almost July... let's set a goal: The next demo will be released by August 31st. The demo will contain a full month's worth on content. Not only that, but by July 31st, there will be an announcement on the homepage saying that we should expect the next demo by the end of August.
Now, I'm not your boss, so of course you don't have to do this. But if you don't do this, you all need to admit to yourselves that nothing is happening, and that the game will never be finished. It's a challenge, but you can do it. Shut me up and put me in my place by restoring all of our faith in you!
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