Btw (if you're still checking these threads), totally fine to do some extra content for Patreon or whatever. Plenty of devs do, there's zero wrong with that. But yea, codes tend to be pase (cracking is super easy, codes get leaked easily). The most common thing I've seen on here that seems to be successful is having Patreon-only early releases (so that each iteration there's a Public release 2.0 and a Patreon release 3.0 or something like that) with the reward being 'getting there first', or a Patreon / Itch.to release that has a bit of extra (non game-gating) content and a Public release on here.
The first one is great because it lets people support you when they're able to (finances fluctuate, and even for those that are stable financially there are a lot of devs to support so they'll regularly subscribe for a month to one, then cancel and subscribe to another, and just keep going, 'cause otherwise they'd be supporting all the top-scoring long-history devs only and new devs - like you - would never get into the running). By having a (delayed) Public release it keeps excitement going for a (full-content) title, keeps people checking in for updates, and then folk can drop into Patreon/Itch when they're able.
The second one sounds like what would appeal to you more. Its essentially what you were doing with codes, but without codes (which yea, get leaked within days of posting, that's been an issue with codes and keys since the 90s). And its fine, just means you have to maintain two files. I haven't generally seen folk on here leak a private build if a public one was availalbe with most of the content - which isn't to say it never happens, or it doesn't happen elsewhere. But its not common. The dangerous thing with that (and keys) is that folk will often not support every version. There are a lot of games to play and so even if I wanted to I couldn't play all the releases on day-zero. Plus folk like to give releases time to build up content instead of downloading and playing 5 extra frames at a time. So the problem becomes that if a private-release has some content that's not in the public you have to be very careful that it doesn't destabilize the public-release next-version. For example, one of the games on here has a 'choice' for a scene where you can see two possible scenes, and a third (image and a bit of text) are patreon only. That's fine because all three of them have essentially the same outcome (the same variable is set) and the specifics never come up again. Your design though (locking a breeder or something away) would risk someone getting patreon-1.4 (w/ that unlocked breeder), then downloading public-1.8, and the game locks up because it tries to display the invalid breeder. So it will be a headache for you to manage that in a stable fashion.
(Oh, and there's the third path, trying to design for Steam, and using all these non-Steam releases as free beta-testers. But that's very risky with AI art because the laws around AI art are currently in flux, and not even consistent between countries / regions, so you could find yourself in a bad place doing that on such a public platform. I think, for example, that there are some US regions that require you to specify that an image is AI generated unless it has... I forget what % extra 'personal' effort done after the image was created, or how they tell)
Anyway, just stuff to think about. Don't worry too much about the hate-posts, sorry about that. Look on the bright side, if this was an NTR game you'd already have half-a-dozen pages about how that's terrible and horrible and NTR once kicked someone's cat or something.
I suggest that if you stick around you just don't enage those kinds of posts / posts that aren't constructive. That's never gone well for anyone, from a new dev to a top celebrity. Good luck!
