This little slip of tongue made me burst out of laughter. Thanks for the compliment !
But remember that I'm nothing more than the chief janitor of the Modding Club. And that I'm not even doing my job properly, since I left a lot of content without any update nor cleanup for months due to my low availability.
To me, the ones who truly deserve praise are the modders untiringly creating high-quality content for us to enjoy and their "shogun", Enimaroah, without whom none of this would have taken off.
Like I wrote in my previous message :
"Basically, it's going to be a modern version of Rapelay with a graphical quality on par with Play Club and the character customisation system from Honey Select. It isn't going to be anything spectacular but will still be a title that you absolutely want to have in your library if you like dark-themed games."
It may look like Illusion isn't pushing forward fast enough, but it only feels like it because we're too impatient. When you take a step back and look at the big picture, the improvements they made over time are quite substantial.
Illusion began experimenting with Unity back in 2012, with a title named "
もぐもぐゆなちゃん" (Nom nom Yuna-chan) a browser game based on
Ore ga Shujinkou that was later ported to Android.
It means that everything considered, they only have about 5 years of experience with the engine, which is not much : software development, and especially gamedev, is a lengthy process. For a small studio, such a timeline is barely enough to develop a full-featured game : as an example, the development of
Factorio started 5 years ago.
The first Unity-based PC title they made (
Harem Mate) was released less than 3 years ago. And a few months later, when
Play Club was released, the enhancements over the previous generation of games based on their in-house Yayoi Engine were massive. When you compare it to
Real Play, that was released the year before, the evolution is impressive.
They raised the bar even further a few months later, with
Sexy Beach Premium Resort, an open-world game mixing dating simulation and adventure-action elements. They raised the bar so high that they failed reaching it, releasing the game in a really poor state : it felt unfinished and ran like crap due to a total lack of optimisation (and a lack of understanding of the engine). But it still gave birth to the most advanced character customisation system ever made for an erotic game, that they still use to this day.
This failure is probably what discouraged them from trying to rush the development of full-featured games. Since then, they only released realtime-3D visual novels and slowed their release schedule down. This is the most clever thing they could do : you can't expect to make a complex game like this in less than a couple years, especially when you're a small team of inexperienced developers.
So, if what you're wishing for is a full-fledged free-roaming adventure/simulation game like the titles from the
Artificial Series, you really need to understand that this kind of game takes time and learn to be patient. There were a 3-years gap between AG2 and AG3. Then another 4 years before they released the first
Artificial Academy, with a sequel that came 3 years later.
Since it takes them 3 to 4 years to release this kind of title, and since they burned themselves trying to rush SBPR, don't expect anything else than 3DVN "click-and-watch" games for the time being. If they have something big in the pipeline, it probably won't be out before mid-2018.
Until then, graphical enhancements and experiments on new features are welcome. They're slowly beginning to master their new toolset, and it can only proves useful for their bigger projects.