In a professional sense there is one route to success. The proper way to develop a video game is to design it before development starts. There are three stages to video game development: pre production, production, and post production. Which is to say planning, creation, polishing. The primary design of a game should be complete before development of the game begins, this helps to eliminate feature creep and bloat, it allows the development team to plan things out and know when certain milestones should be set, and it also allows the development team to know when they should discuss cutting content to ensure they put out a quality product in the time allotted. This allows a game to be created in an organized fashion that will meet goals and milestones with regularity. There should never be a "I felt bad for taking two months off, so I'm going to add content to make up for it." and instead there should be "I've had to push back milestones, please be patient while I adjust. .6 will be a little late, but it will be out.", if ICSTOR had actually approached making .6 in a professional, focused manner we probably would have seen it much, much sooner.
The biggest flaw with most patreon or kickstarter based game development projects, pornographic or otherwise, is a lack of understanding of this core concept. You come up with EVERYTHING that will be in the game before you so much as write a single line of code, and then you organize it into what is called a Detailed Design Document which is the bible for the game. The patreon supporters shouldn't have a say in anything outside of possibly the order that it is developed in, and even that is questionable. The first update should have been written before it was even started, which would have allowed the writer to write the second while the first was in development, and so on and so forth. Game development only runs smoothly if there is foresight, it only works if you future proof it, it only works if you've planned ahead. If you don't design a game before you start working on it you wind up with the gong show that is Milfy City and that kind of development breaks people.
