An all-to-common refrain from devs of these game types. Don't get me wrong, I feel neither entitled to complain nor celebrate. Things happen and life gets in the way sometimes. I feel most devs get into this business, if you will, not being fully aware or educated about time-management, the creative process and technical limitations. For example, and it may seem a bit incongruent, but I still see new devs spitting out CG in deflated PNG format, offering subpar artwork. What that tells me is they haven't done their homework.
The above doesn't necessarily apply to Mircom, not at this stage in the game, but one of his mistakes was to introduce so many LIs and their resulting pathways. Every new route not only robs existing routes of a richer story, but exponentially increases the amount of coding variables and all the CG that has to accompany the expanding story. After a while this tends to grind down the motivation and drive of an individual developer. Releases are fewer and farther in between, complaints go up, motivation declines.
Which brings me to another point...or two:
First, as I have attempted to recommend to new developers (without much success), the entire arc of a story should be written before the first piece of code or artwork is ever created. It's called storyboarding and there's a reason why cinema creatives do it this way. It anticipates how much work will be needed and keeps the project defined and on track.
And related to the above is this...Whatever the release schedule is (and personally I think 4x/year is fine as I don't like 10 minute updates), have the first two releases made before you release the first. Then stay ahead one release. That way, just in case you run into some unforeseen obstacle and are delayed, you can make it appear you're still on schedule by releasing the next installment. That would keep the screech way down as there are thousands of entitled players of these games that become quite upset if their expectations aren't met.
Second, why so few of these devs work in teams? Ok, you might state, what about payment structure. I admit someone somewhere might take advantage, but if structured correctly, payment should be made on work completed. So if a writer submits his work, a coder his, and the CG artist his, then whoever is the agreed upon leader can then structure a payment to suit the time invested. There are teams producing games on this site and they are making it work and quite well in some cases. A single person has a huge uphill battle in going it alone. I think they think they can pocket all the money, but when the project goes off the rails, how much do they then make? Better to have three people making something as opposed to one person making nothing.
Oh well, enough pontificating from me. Just take whatever advice
GetOutOfMyLab has to offer. He's a smart cookie.