We were able to hire some extra "hands" for helping out with modelling and texture design. These people have worked on the models on a freelance basis.

Regrettably it was not possible to find extra people to help with coding. Most people work with engines like Unity and are not used to coding in C++ directly.

We are putting a lot of effort in making "modding" possible. We hope this will speed up new releases after this (mayor) one.
This is also the mayor reason things take far longer then we hand hoped and expected. The current engine contains a lot of "in code" things that are now in scripts.

After this release people will be able to build their own scenes, models, cloth, scripting etc and create small stories. Also adaptation of the scenes and models in next release will be possible.

I hope it will make more people join once they get their hands on the new engine and are able to do things with it.

I will not pretend it will be easy to create a complete new story from scratch. But it will be possible and we will put a lot of examples and scripts on the forum to help doing new things.

Basically there will be three levels you can mod:

1) SIMPLE: Change textures, model parameters like skin color etc.
2) INTERMEDIATE: Change responses in scripts, add new sounds to responses, change the way a girl react to you.
3) EXPERT: Change models, create new objects.

The first 2 ones do not require 3-party software (besides image and text editor)
The third option does require Maya.

We will see how things go after the release.

you have a huge pool of volunteers.

6 month starting from the 4th months, that the progression that was put out, so if ya can't wait then ya didn't read it, even ya did, it should of been known by now that the game won't come out until October in the beginning of the week or in the middle of the month of October.