Probably that was the mistake from the beginning ..(too much mood for a particular character)
Certainly the game would have advanced and other characters would have entered the scene (like the neighbor and the classmates).
Maybe even the game would be in the final stages now, the amount of requests and donations involved ended up in this ..
Dev did not have a chance, previous work shows that he does not like games that are too time-consuming (prefers short games, rests a while and does the second chapter) ..
Worst of all is how this has been affecting moods and spread to other games ..
That's part of the problem of this kind of "off the cuff" style of development. Who knows whether or not the cast was originally meant to be this large? Or if it was, maybe a lot of these side characters that got popular weren't intended to be introduced so soon into things.
Now the thing is, I get it: I know how tempting it is to just sort of sit down and
do stuff. Start writing, start creating, whatever. And if that means a whole bunch of new characters get generated, or the plot goes off in a direction you didn't expect, well, you just deal with it. But it also leaves you really vulnerable to writing yourself into a corner. Or, in cases like this, dumping a cast that's far too large to manage into your lap and leaving you unable to develop them all properly.
As much as I've never liked the idea of having an "outline" of major plot events from the get-go, there's good reason for people to do that. It keeps you from overextending yourself. At the very least, keeping a "series bible" so you know what major story events are going to happen, roughly where they're going to happen and who's going to be involved, so you know what characters to introduce, when they need to be active in the narrative and all that... well... yeah, keeps you from ending up with a kludgy mess like this.
But again, all that involves a lot more thinking ahead than was probably involved here. And it's just not in keeping with everyone's M.O., either.