hi pspeed I know a game "starforge"those developers were lumberjacks If I recall, they launched a very early alpha for a kickstarter and managed to raise enough funds to quit their job, maybe you should do the same all I'd recommend is maybe a creature or 2 and some weapons or weapon, then launch it for a kickstarter, I see your game going far, I understand funds are an issue, if you do a kickstarter you'd free up time for mythruna, just a suggestion.I know it's been suggested before but I think you should consider again,.
I really hate getting into these conversations because everyone has a different idea of how much money it takes to do what. I make my living, pay my bills, and I've run many teams... as well as worked for small business that have both succeeded and failed on their funding. I'm very aware of the stark reality of the finances involved.
As explained a few times before, here and elsewhere. Kickstarter is no good for me. It's like the rocket equations. To get more payload up, you need more fuel, but more fuel weighs more so you need more fuel... which weighs more, and so on.
I'm not in a position to live in a shack and eat Ramen noodles every day to develop Mythruna.
To quit my job, I'd have to ask for something close to half a million. No one is going to give me half a million to develop Mythruna... and if they did, they'd expect me to hire a bunch of people and get it done faster. So I'd have to ask for even more. If I ask for a million (never in a hundred years would people kick in that much) then they'd expect triple-A quality art so I'd have to hire a team of full time artists... and so on. Not to mention, hiring those folks would take at least 6 months... meanwhile I'm still burning through cash and folks are wondering what I did with it.
Frankly, if there were that many folks willing to fund Mythruna up to $1 million then the donation page would already be swimming in cash. It's just not.
On the other side of the coin, with my wife's brain cancer and her lowered mobility, I spend much of my week taking care of her and my two kids. I don't even work full time at my regular job these days as I take a lot of "leave without pay" and accumulate additional debt as necessary. My ability to work on games comes in small intervals here and there... or when I'm avoiding going to sleep because I need to stay up until I'm exhausted just to make sure I fall asleep properly these days. All of the next steps in Mythruna are major motions... whether it's networking or AI or what have you. They require lots of undivided "fully awake" time. Not an hour here and there squeezed between work, the dad-taxi-service, and sleeping.
This is part of the reason I've been working on side projects. Most of the time, there is some or another aspect that benefits Mythruna. For example, the open sourced IsoSurface demo stuff has a terrain pager in it that is way better than the one I used for Mythruna but could easily serve Mythruna's terrain. Doing that development, I already fixed at least three major bugs that Mythruna's existing pager (in the new engine) definitely has but would have been harder to find there. Also, as part of that project I added something called "instancing" to JME which will definitely help Mythruna down the road.
And at the very least, the side projects keep my brain in coding and I get inspired to get back to Mythruna. Finishing SimArboreal, finishing the IsoSurface demo... finishing things is addictive. I need to be doing stuff right now that I can work on in one-two hour chunks and that I have a hope of finishing in a short amount of time. Two such side-projects will also go a long way to getting past the next two major Mythruna hurdles. (networked physics and the base AI framework)
