Flynn and Atem aren't related. They met via AVNs and interest in animation, and became decent friends.
As for the timeline, I'm not going to share private Discord DMs between myself and Atem, but the last time I heard from him was 14 Oct 2024 as well (slightly later than the public posts above), and that was a completely normal conversation with no indication of anything of concern. He was even literally working on Stormside during that conversation, too, since he was asking my opinion about some aspects of the scene he was working on.
Can you spill Atemsiel's secret? Was he ICSTOR?
No, seriously, does he have another job in real life?
Did he have trouble concentrating? He seems to want to do something one way before abandoning it very quickly.
As you said on Discord, you can't ask people to keep paying, if he doesn't have a job in real life it's the only thing that will bring him back as it says
Vibesy , life is easy when you have a comfortable income while during the day you just play games on Steam.
One day we should really think about calling an exorcist, there is a curse on VN developers, in terms of deaths in their family, their house burning, floods, tornadoes, depression, sometimes I have the impression their father died 3 times, they have a new child to take care of every 15 days.
If he's afraid to continue Stormside because he's taken too many different paths and it's becoming too difficult, he should start a new, simple project. He'll come back to Stormside later... or not, or he'll do a simple remake of Stormside.
Often, when the game gets bigger and bigger, the developers can't keep up, and it becomes too difficult.