It's entirely claymation, everything in the game, including the characters and the combat animations, is animated with clay. That must've taken hours upon hours of time. But, it still came out, and five years later got a fantastic sequel. (Seriously, the scale went up massively with Hylics 2 in both visuals, soundtrack, and gameplay.)

Hylics is a claymation game that is still beloved to this day. It's a decade old! It got finished in a year, according to Wikipedia. And mind you, Hylics is a claymation game, that took time, and one dude is working on this whole thing. If you look at the combat animations, you can definitely see that time and effort went into making these clay swirls move in a satisfying way. I must emphasize this for you, one person did all that. And then, this one dude released the sequel five years later with only help from another music composer to improve the soundtrack. The only difference in the gameplay creation process is that Hylics 2 was created with the Unity Engine, and that was what made the scale drastically increase.

ONE MAN CREATED HYLICS 1 AND 2 OVER THE COURSE OF 6 YEARS.

Meanwhile, Heartbound's demo dropped on 2017 and was supposed to be released the next year. Here's the thing about Heartbound, this shit can be made on rpg maker or game maker. Yes, it will take time, but that doesn't mean that it should take 8 years for a single game to get finished.

ESPECIALLY, when it got kickstarter money. Could it have been the next Undertale? I don't know. It never got finished, and the hype for this game is long gone. Maybe it could've found success if it was finished in the timeframe Pirate had set.

I'm sorry but with what I'm seeing, this game, at most, should've taken 2-3 years. It's not like Pirate's working by himself here, he has a whole game developing studio, and he still has not finished. His studio has released only one, properly finished game, and that is Heroes of Breakfast.

Of course, saying the game can be made on RPG maker is not an insult to it, it's just that I don't understand what exactly was preventing this game from coming out faster. Pirate has a game studio and has more than enough money to find hired help thanks to the kickstarter.

For example, Fear and Hunger was made on RPG Maker and released in December 2018, and then got a sequel four years later. For proof, Hylics 1 was made on RPG Maker, and got its sequel that was made in Unity five years later.