All the speculation on the development of this game is kind of reducious. He didn't pick a "too difficult engine" to work with, he literally picked unity and bought assets for it that basically saves most of the work. The tools he is using to make this game, is not a tools for a programmer it's a tool for an artist.
The people commenting unity for beeing bad is like asking a novice chef not chopping veggies well, its not the knives fault, its just that the chef needs practice and skill. Now i don't know why he went for 64bit only, as people have mentioned, VN's arent really that demanding to require 64bit only. Maybe there was some other issue.
All of the tools he purchased to make the game, in the unity asset store, allows for some customization, for example the UI design, and stuff around it. Basically how the game "looks"
That's why his game can look professional, but these UI effects are built in functionality of what he bought. I think it looks nice but you can clearly see it needs more polishing, expected for beeing a demo, but perhaps if it really took 6 months to get to this point. Nah. Maybe he took a well needed vacation break from developing the last game.
The only thing I would be worried about is the fact that none of these two assets that he got is really designed for visual novels, not the conversation system or the engine. That will be the interesting part to see for me. When you buy finished assets like this, the biggest difficulty is to make them all play together and work the way you want it to. And if you want to expand on those tools then you sit in a really bad position.
Most people, even experienced programmers wouldnt sit and customize other peoples assets so much, because then you can't update it so easy in the future if the original creator gives out an updated version.
Things like "saving in dialogue" , "replaying scenes", galleries, all this jazz, that is very VN-game specific, does not come out of the box in his engine choice. He is not the first game in unity that cannot save mid dialogue, and there is a reason for this, they all went with assets from the unity store that were meant for other types of games, and then they get stuck with it.
He would have to make a lot of custom stuff. And that's where I am worried, someone that has a lot of programming experience would not just save that for later. He should have made this work before the demo version went public, because its not easy, if he is unable to add it very soon, the fans are going to just nag the shit out of him and cause stress. I also doubt that the save system had saving for multiple paths in mind, for example you cant really see which save is for what, its just a list. But we have seen this in other games too, for example big brother, the twist? They all had just timestamps on the save. I liked that about most other games, they show screenshots of where you saved,
If it has taken him 6 months to do this demo, and on top of this, you cannot save mid dialogue or even press esc to open menues etc. Either he is way in over his head, or he basically just spent 4 months vacationing, 1 week to find the assets he needs, most of the remaining time designing characters, writing and doing some rendering, and then finally, customizing the UI of the game to look fresher.
The game will turn out well, eventually, but i think it may stumble upon a bunch of hiccups on the way that may cause frustrations with the developer, and ultimately the fans.
