Maybe I should ask a Question first. What if:You answered your own question in your question. Even if I take months to plan things ahead, all the minigames, systems required for X or Y story line, if I forget ever 1 variable for a system that system will possibly unusable, and those months of planning will have been useless.
What I could do for the future is to prepare saves for every version I release, a "skip to content" if you will. But with the relatively small amount of content the game has (you can complete everything in about 2 hours if you're a new playern perhaps less), I didn't think that was necessary.
I have one or more List of Events and only add events there. If I change an Event in this by adding a variable, only this event should be corrupted. This can be repaired at the start of the game, the reading of the save or the loading of the event itself.
If you add new Pages or Events, the framework should have no problem with freshly created variables or not?
If you are renaming variables, you have to build a converter and run it before a save is being read by the game.
Unfortunately, I can't say if and how any of this would work with Renpy and how much work this would cause.
Thanks for your time.