As for TLG, this was totally unexpected. He was doing well with patrons and was one of the top devs here. I'm still holding out hope that TLG comes back.
Thaught about it a while now...
All considered, its not really suprising anymore and pretty sure he pulled the plug himself cause he snapped.
First you have to know, TLG struggled with some issues anyways, mental health and such. And he admitted once he cant handle stress that well too and had some other issues aswell.
Than playing this game... or better, tkae a look at the code if you are able to. There are TONS of errors in it, and everybody who knows a little something about coding... every error adds up to another, and so on... its only getting worse.
With the upcoming part TLG was heading to a somewhat "finale" and at this point there HAS to be some major branching choices to set up... this is something that is really not easy... and if you play the whole game with different LI-paths you can celarly see, TLG struggles with branching.... A LOT. Its so often the case that there are dialogues and scenes which are refering to Jenny or Ashley as if you were together with them, even if you are not... but that ist just a little bit of the examples... this goes for every girl path... and those errors piled up during chapter 5 in a huge amount already.
I didnt bothered me that much, but i noticed those errors... and if i would place myself in the shoes of TLG i wouldnt know how to solve them anymore.
He wanted to bring out chapter 6 in two parts... first part should have been out around august. It wasnt the case, than he said he wanted to bring it out complete, not in parts anymore. But he said that when everybody was already expecting part one of chapter 6 will come out the next days. So it was obvious that something went wrong already. Or he needed more time to get it done... whatever.
In the past he made the same mistake over and over again, announcing release-dates. TLG was one of VERY few Devs that did that. Most of the DEVs just say something like "well i aim for a relase during this and this month or so" but TLG aimed for a particular week, and very early on too. This puts a huge amount of pressure on him too, but he did that to himself.
After august there was already some comlaining going on in discord and some other places...
Overall i think things piled up, erorrs in the game and code. Putting pressure on himself to get the update out in time, and maybe there was some issues with the music copyright too, wouldnt be surpised here... and on top of that maybe something in real life happened to... and thats it, he snapped and just said to himself "fuck all this" and pulled the plug. Vanished from the internet (which is easy to do) and thats it now...
There is no other explantion, he had to delete his patreon page himself to look like this. Patreon doesnt do it like this, they lock pages first and after a while they delete it... the was no lock. it was just "puff" gone. TLG did this himself.
He was not hacked either, he could easily tell others via thousands ways to communicate. Other issues would have been communicated too in some way. It just makes no sense at all to think something from the "outside" happened. Not even that he died suddenly... than the patreon page wouldnt have been shut down either like it is. And of course some guys would know about it and communicate it and it would have get through to us too at some point.
No he shut down everything by himself and thats it. No other way. And to realise that, there is no hope either that this game will go on...
And it might sound strange to most guys around here, but its not that uncommon to act like that... i did something similar to that myself more than once. Cutted even ties to family completley from one day to another for years. To cut ties from a project like this is very easy to do... its just one mouseclick.
And if things are growing above your head, sometimes you just do that... pull the plug and say "fuck this" and TLG did that, no doubt... every other theory is more like whishful thinking.
The game did grow over his head (especially the branching), he couldnt pull it off in the way he wanted to, snapped and did throw everything out of the window. Thats it. Not really mystery all considered.
