So after ghosting everyone, he comes back with a rant. Says "Feb 5th, no Feb 6th... no wait Feb 16th is the release date. 0.9 is already finished, he's working on 1.0 that he plans to release at the end of the month."
What is the point of pulling dates out of his ass if he's just making shit up? 5 Months isn't the end of the world for a quality update, but on discord he just keeps ranting about haters making him change the way he wants to create the game and how they're making him compromise.
It's as easy as stop making deadline promises he can't keep and communicating with progress every few weeks. He puts himself into these stressful situations and blames the fanbase.
Yep, I don't see why they give themselves public deadlines and put themselves in these situations. If they want deadlines to have a target of completion, just keep it to themselves and show a progress bar to others.
As for the "making him change the way he wants to create the game," the only one I've seen is about the puzzles/minigames (if there's any about making it a VN instead of sandbox, that's just subjective/personal preference, I don't think that needs to be changed, though it would be nice to have a VN option). Personally, I think they should add an option to turn off minigames, though that would just give this dev more work, which they clearly can't handle. Its a shame modders haven't been able to make a walkthrough mod with puzzle helper yet. I personally don't mind the puzzles, I just think making them so complicated to the point where you can spend either actual hours to figure them out, or you need an external walkthrough, is kinda dumb. At the very least if you wanna have a complex puzzle/minigame system, you should have:
1) Toggle to turn the system on/off
2) A hint system
3) A pity/difficulty system to make it not drag out for infinite time
Of course none of these are necessary, and would add more dev time, but if the dev insists on keeping puzzles its something they should consider.
Nothing wrong with not wanting to compromise your product, but then don't complain when others don't like it. If you are making it for others and are expecting them to pay, then you either gotta stick to your product and be satisfied with the people who believe in your vision to pay, or change your product to cater to a larger audience if you aren't satisfied with that.