A lot more was added/changed in the last 2 years. UI rewrite, reworked traits and stats etc.
Even a switch to UE5 was tried and abandoned.
But I don't want to argue about how slow game dev can be. Specially when it's only one dev with a normal dayjob.
I understand the frustration to want things to progress faster.
I however can't understand how assuming laziness and downplaying the efforts would change anything about that.
If anything it might even contribute to the dev not wanting to do any work on it for a while.
It's easy to assume things but hard to give constructive criticism.
That's literally just playing around with some attributes and editing the Strings. A UI rewrite for this game shouldn't take longer than a month - even for a novice. Especially since there are so many assets in the stores to make stuff like this as simple as possible.
I followed this game since may 2017 and was a patron back then. With all the money he got during the prime of the game and even now, I doubt he's entertaining a normal dayjob right now.
Given the games update sizes and his schedule, I naturally assume that he doesn't wanna work on this game anymore. He probably still gets more in a month than a lot of people in a whole year for barely doing the absolute minimum to maintain his Patreon.
For example I could just as well assume from the only 2 posts of you I looked at about the VN you are working on, that all you did the last 2 years is a few renders.
But instead I just wanted to say the renders look promising and I hope things progress nicely with your VN.
If my VN would bring me mid-ranged 5-digits $$$, trust me, I would be working everyday on it. But I'm getting 0$ from my VNs (since I haven't released them) so I actually have to deal with a full time job.
In those 2 years I finished an apprenticeship as a Java developer and was busy working on other (non-gaming) projects.
For the VNs I even created a label (and held a competition for the label logo lol) for publishing.
I was already working a few months on that VN before posting the renders. Planned out most of the things I wanted to implement: Main story from beginning to the end (yes, an ending so I don't increment the games version by 0.0001 every 2 months until the end of time), all the characters, key story events, repeatable events, timeline, all locations, technical stuff to immidiately start rendering and not playing around with settings. Very soon I noticed that it got way bigger than I was expecting it to be since it would be my first Renpy game.
I put it on hold and decided to create a much smaller VN that I'm working on rn. I'm writing a novel since a few years and I use the lore I've written for my book for the VNs. They're basically spin-offs of my novel and connected. (Already written the stories for a total of 5 VNs xd)
And the VN I'm working on now? Started it this october. Story is done, I completed the script 2 weeks ago. Characters & dialogues are finished, locations are set, scenes are fully planned. Main characters are done and ready for rendering. I'm fine-tuning the locations and will then begin with the scenes. Progress for this VN is good so far, thanks.
