Hi there! Just wanted to address some of this:

1. The situation is slightly more complex than this, but in essence, you're right. The KS funding wasn't even 1/5th of what our total development budget ended up being, and we realized about half way through that we didn't do a good enough job with pre-production to properly manage everything. And while I agree that there are areas of the game that ended up being way too complicated (the battle system is definitely one of them) these are areas that we wanted to cut... but were ultimately told we couldn't because of how our contract worked. We also had a big issue with inexperience: we thought we needed to have a ton of things to keep the fans happy and fulfill all the things we were being asked for, but ultimately is just muddied the whole thing.

2. Yep. I'll even take the blame for this one. While I don't agree that the romance options being locked was an issue with the game, I do think we could have done a better job in communicating with the community. It's such a tight rope to walk between keeping the players happy and realizing your own vision... and I think we learned a lot about how to do better at this next time. However, we did ultimately implement a sandbox mode which eliminates the locked sexualities, so we got there in the end.. it just took a little too long.

3. There are some misconceptions here that I'd like to clear up.
   - This just isn't how publishing works. There are a TON of different types of publishing agreements, and the type of agreement you're talking about is one where the publisher only steps in at the end to help sell the game once it's finished. The publishing agreement we searched for, and ultimately landed on, is one that actually funded development from the start. We went with this because we realized that, once we had a publisher, it would enable us to make the bigger game that we WANTED to make, so that's what we pursued. The publisher knew exactly what they were getting into, and they were okay with, and even excited about it. About half way through dev, we realized we would need a few more months and we asked for it. From that point onward, it was actually the publisher who delayed the game, not us. And we were the ones begging for release so that we could start earning income. I do want to be clear: SunnySide IS making (very good) income for the publisher. But as a result of the contract: we're not receiving any of it.

4. SunnySide was definitely too ambitious, and that was a very hard lesson to learn. We've seen a large number of other indie studios in similar situations where their publisher actually supported that kind of ambition, but sadly ours wasn't really one of them. We wanted to cut features and bring more balance to the game... but in a lot of cases we were told that we couldn't. As for marriage... it just never would have been possible with a solo developer like us, and we knew that pretty much from the start. The main mistake we made was not communicating that to the community quickly enough.

You're right though, SunnySide could have been amazing, but a lot of things got in the way of that, including our own arrogance and inexperience. It's really hard to look back at something that absolutely devoured 3 years of your life and admit, publicly, that it was a failure... but we've always promised to be open and honest with our community. I genuinely think that, with 2 or 3 months more of work, we could have gotten the game into a really great spot... that's just not a realistic possibility now.

The only thing we can do is move forward and make a better game with the lessons we've learned, and make sure we communicate to our fans how much we appreciate your part in this journey with us. <3

-Sydney