Hello Stronkboi, I played your game a while ago and I liked the initial concept and came back to check up on whats new. The thing about this itcho site is people are too easy to please, and as such generally leave nice feedback and kind words, but what they don't realize is that its not helping you in terms of you getting critical and important feedback that you need. If you don't know the problems how can you fix them? anyways ill get to that later on in this post. But first things first.
Reading these devlogs I just have to say something and its not going to be pleasant, sorry. Please understand its because I care about your game and want to see it finished sometime in the future.
You should leave your personal life out of this, that's something that should be reserved for people you are close to. Not a project you are working on and its community. The reason im saying this is because its unfair to your community, its emotional blackmail but you most likely were not it doing on purpose.
But that's what it is, because it's a way to explain away the various problems that you have had during development. It's an unintentional way of making excuses and again im not saying you are doing it on purpose you probably didnt realise you were doing it. Like I said, family and friends. Or if its with this community, a bit more private instead of public announcements.
If you can seperate these things from your project and this community, it will benefit both you and the people who love your game.
So please, when you post about development and updates. Talk about the game, and only the game and its progress. If you need to mention irl because it had an effect on the former be short and to the point and vague about it, because its private.
That's all I have to say on that point, but there were a few other things as well. In a previous devlog you were asking for critical feedback and I do have some to give, though its been a while and I probably should do a replay if the game changed significantly.
1. I remember there being stops in the story between segments of the game so basically the author talking to the reader about the next part of the game and its features and such. Those really don't need to be there, these things can be explained outside of the game rather than in the game.
2. The first couple of chapters had a good flow to the storyline from what I recall, but after that everything seemed to move too fast. Each setting that was reached felt like it needed to be explored for longer, and I felt like some of the most interesting parts of the game were getting forgotten (for example, reading about past lore events with the other characters).
3. Shortly after reaching the underground dwarf area is when new elements and characters were getting introduced more and more quickly as the story went on. The pacing in general got a bit too fast and the story was getting more difficult to follow and/or stay invested in. Not long after that point is when I had stopped since that's as far as the games development had reached.
4. Ok some positive feedback now, im not a total grinch I promise. Your characters are likeable, and lovely. The romantic and e scenes that they have are also great. You have a knack for character development and I think you should make that a big focus. The other good part of your writing is your lore (aka worldbuilding) and you should definitely consider a refocus onto that as well. While I do appreciate the random humor, I think it might be good to break the 4th wall a lot less and add more subtlety to it.
Other thoughts - I see you have a discord for feedback, thats good. Ontop of that you definitely should seek out as much help from more experienced people as you can (other authors, devs) and other sites that specialize in visual novels or writing in general.
I Understand that this was a lot of text to read, and I may be really out of date with some of that feedback since I played this a long while ago. So if I missed the mark completely on a bunch of things my bad.
I also understand that a lot of the things I said in this post are potentially upsetting to a lot of people, since im not holding back and I'm speaking very bluntly and honestly. So if this does upset a lot of people, I wont hold it against you if you want to delete this post entirely. So long as you read it once that's good enough for me.
But at least its not another post just saying 'I love your game, you can do it buddy' right? because quite honestly, I think posts like that are far more insulting and valueless than actual critical feedback.