I am not a renpy developer but I am a Patreon supporter to Agent 53X. I sent him DM with your article but the Patreon supporters had has this release for some people up to 2 weeks and not one has posted an issue on his Patreon site.
I understand what you are saying, just so you know I rarely use mods in my games, if I want a walkthrough I just search for one in a pdf or something like that, if there isn't one, I look at the code of the game for a walkthrough.
A lot of it has to do with where people are saving their game too. The last version I have is 0.8, and I know the numbering sequence is off, but he jump from 0.8 to 0.1.4 for some reason. He also changed some things in the code from the previous release, this is something devs should avoid at all costs if they can. From what I saw the little he did shouldn't have broken my save from last game though.
One thing he did do is pretty obvious, he changed the variable for the name of the MC from "mc_male" from the last release to "persistent.mc_male". He set this as the default for the game. This is something you should never do, redefine the variable for a character long after you have released the game, he set this from the second the game loaded up, where before it was "mc_male". If you want to change the variable of the MC like that, you should do it at the beginning of the next update, not the default or the very beginning of the game. I noticed this because after I got my game to load where I was my name was now "None", and this is why. I just had to search around and sort out why it happened, and that's when I found this.
I'm guessing he did it this way to have the MC name show up in the event replays as to whatever the player selected, beings this wasn't in the 0.8 version that I have. Even if he wanted to change them at the beginning of the game like he did, the best thing he could've done was include the following snippet of code:
This would ensure that returning players who loaded a save would have the right name, and it wouldn't affect new players either. That label only gets run when the user loads a save.
There may have been a version that came out in-between 0.8 and 1.4 that I didn't play too, if I looked in the thread and it said "no new content" I'm sure I didn't download the game. Part of making games and mods is to make sure what you do doesn't break them in the future even if someone didn't happen to play for a couple of updates. Sometimes this can't be avoided, but you should try to. I do know that when I dropped in the .rpyc of the last update I played in the game, my save loaded up without an issue, that tells me those changed since the last time I played.
I'm not blaming the dev at all, a lot of this comes from just not knowing about all the little intricacies of these games. There are more things I don't know about Ren'Py games, than the things I do know.
