Hey Aard, I guess this isn't really a question just a comment of appreciation. Not a lot of people would do something so effort intensive like this for free, especially something so scandalous as your work. I know a patreon donation or something is more useful to you, but I don't really have the money right now so I guess this will have to do. Keep on being awesome. ?(P.S. my favorite is the futashep visual novel, I hope you come back to it someday. I think you should put it in a more prominent place on the sight as even unfinished I think it's kind of a hidden gem.)
Au contraire! The words of appreciation really mean more to me as a person and as an artist. The financial support is always appreciated and I physically couldn't do this without it, but it's the appreciation that motivates me.
I really like the Futashep game as well, but it just became too unwieldy to continue working on. Too much work went into production, the narrative branches became too unwieldy, and the engine driving it all was too clunky to manage at scale. If I were to return to it, I would need to massively redesign it on both a technical level and a gameplay level.
Toward that end, I think it's better to leave it as it is than to lobotomize it and fundamentally alter its personality. It is what it is, and even if it isn't finished, I think it succeeded in what I wanted to do with it.
I'm taking the lessons learned and putting them toward a new project, but it is a long ways away before I am ready to say anything publicly about what that project is.
That's another lesson learned, actually - to not share until I have something of substance. The microreleases ended up being unintuitively more time-consuming and exhausting than larger releases. There was too much pressure to constantly be working and releasing things with the microrelease schedule. With the larger release schedule, I can take my time because people have the expectation of long waits.