I admire your interest in dev work as a whole, and I also liked lifeplay quite a lot; it had ideas that would have fit well with this game, though something lifeplay lacked as a whole was visual quality, which I feel your work is better about. Regarding Patreon, I think you may want to look at an example of a game very similar to (though superior to in my eyes in terms of quality) LifePlay called Influencing. It appears to be doing quite well as far as patreon goes, likely due to it having a dedicated AI server you can pay for on patreon to use. Besides that, the game itself has clear polish and seems to have a focused scope in its theme. Taking some plays out of the book of Golden Crow, the dev for Influencing, might help if you want to publish a game and monetize it. On f95, I can confidently say that this game, Influencing, and LifePlay are very unique with a group of people who love these types of sims. The initial reception may have been bad, but that doesn't erase that the product you intended to put out does have a very dedicated audience.