Hey.
- I have outlined the reasons for why I prefer not to add members to the team. In summary, if I thought doing so would magically speed things up while making sure the project is still fun for us, I would do it, but in the first place, I don't think things are as simple, and I'm fairly certain even with more team members, I would still have to spend a lot of time coordinating things (or waiting for deliveries); that's part of the problem, making WaL is challenging and that could be very difficult mentally -- the one thing that drives me is that I like making it (I like writing the dialogues, posing them, and trying to make things as fun and sexy as I can). which leads to the second point: if my job becomes more managerial, I don't think I'd like doing it.
The one advantage of having more team members is that they can mitigate the risk of life events slowing down the development, and if I thought events like the ones that happened last year were common occurrences, then I would consider it, but I don't think that's the case.
- Why did we not pause Patreon even though our work was impacted by real life events? here's the main reason (in addition to what CGNefarious said about talking with patrons -- I don't remember if it was done through a poll or a post where I asked people to comment and respond): pausing the patreon would have effectively given us a permission to pause the development which with everything that was going on then, I believe, would have brought the project to a halt. I remember that since after having the baby and going through two surgeries we knew our work would be impacted, I offered refunds to patrons in a Patreon post, but aside from that, we decided to just work as many hours as we could every day because we didn't want to see this project stop (our dream is to plan the 1.0 version), hoping that with time, the number of hours we could dedicate to work every day would increase (it has, not to the pre-baby levels, but things definitely have improved).
Also, we're self-employed, and if I pause Patreon, eventually one or both of us will have to start looking for work elsewhere, which will make the project go even slower.
- I don't think it is necessary to specify whether there's going to be a release or not. Since 0.1 I have posted a daily progress tracker, and if that's not a clear indication of whether an update is imminent or not, I don't know what is. Now more specifically about "are you happy with the way you navigated last 18 months of progress?" That's harder to answer. Would I have liked to release the update sooner (for so many reasons)? yes, and so far as I have failed to do that, I'm of course not happy with the way things are. But I'm happy with the work overall for two reasons, one of them I just mentioned above, namely that things are improving (both my health, and the baby's challenges), meaning that I can imagine a future that I look back and think "thank fucking goodness that's over", and second, because I have done every thing I can to work as many hours a day as possible. That means not taking weekends off and working through the night (to maximize the number of hours I can work) for so many months, I don't remember the last time my life was 'normal'. That's me, and I know Chestnut has had a similar experience (she's less active on Discord for a reason: she's very busy with the children on top of her work).