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heya, first off: thanks for the spoiler alert. lot of people don't think to include one and it kills my traffic when new players get spoiled in the comments and never check out the project. 

second: really glad you liked the story and appreciated it. i do get a lot of messages and stuff but i never stop enjoying them and i'm always humbled to talk about the project so thanks for taking the time to jot down your thoughts. 

while I still don't really know what i'm doing when it comes to writing or coding or anything, i do take this thing seriously and put a ton of work and thought into the direction things go so i always appreciate questions

you asked two different questions here but i'm going to regroup them because there's overlap. 

1. Braden POV: you mention wanting to get more screen time with Braden and get his perspective on things to fill in some of the mysteries. originally, this was where my head went too when writing it. my plan waaaaay back was to finish the story and then unlock a second playthrough that was braden's pov. i ended up scrapping that because after working on this project for almost 10 years now (demo dropped in October 2017), i've talked to a lot of people and i've seen how different characters have resonated with the community. I intentionally left most of zack's backstory as vague on purpose because i felt that if people knew too much about him, they'd begin to judge him on whether they thought his lack of self-acceptance was justified or not. i also intentionally made zack's ethnicity ambiguous for the same reasons. leaving things, vague allowed more people to fill in the blanks their own way-- many using experiences from their own lives to help relate to him better as a MC. in time, i learned this to be true about braden as well-- but actually even more so. the bulk of the story really pushes a mindset of being yourself, rather than seeking a label to try and categorize yourself and this same sexual ambiguity became even more powerful with readers when we didn't exactly find out what braden was thinking or what he was doing off camera. while i've never taken a stance on how to label his sexuality, i have my own thoughts but that's just my interpretation. over the years, since the story ended, braden has become a powerhouse to readers that were straight, bi, demi, etc. this perspective extends to things like the bathroom pic you mentioned (which isn't actually included in the other route of the story). it's left to the reader to determine because i found that the community themselves gained more from that and if i suddenly stepped forward to canonize something, in order to do that, i had to take something away from readers and i didn't want to do that. the bulk of the story is philosophical as hell and i wanted to keep that depth in multiple aspects of the story. 

2. Ending: for the revamp version, i have no plans to change the story or ending or anything drastic like that. there's things added in the revamp that weren't in the original but they're mostly cosmetic or just blending sentences together for smoothing things out and stuff like that-- and apparently people have said the revamp is funnier. there's definitely more character personality there because i'm not a complete newb anymore and that helps. 

i mentioned earlier that readers over the years have talked about the story and reacted to the characters and i've listened. i've never let the community steer the story, hell... i didn't even steer the story. the characters did and i can certainly say that i was surprised in the story several times by behaviors or their actions. that being said, when i got to the ending, i was concerned because it's a long story and soooo many people had read the story for soooo many different reasons. some people saw it as some rando porn game (so i specifically included ending related content to say that it wasn't), some people saw it as a voice or as validating their experiences, other older readers saw it as a way to look back at their youth and relive moments from the past, some saw it as giving them the fantasy of a missed opportunity and they lived their coulda-been lives out vicariously through the characters, others saw it as therapy-- feeling the philosophical side was directly confronting them, others read it and saw zack's obstacles and applied their own thoughts to those to overcome similar obstacles.  so when i got to the end, there was a lot of expectations and because there was only one ending (unlike most VNs where you can affect the ending), i needed an ending that checked all the boxes-- or at least most of them. some wanted a happy ending, some needed a happy ending, others wanted a dark ending because the entire trope of gay guy and str8 guy doesn't work, others wanted something literary and deep, some wanted a twist, and some just wanted a mindfuck that made them think. 

so that was my approach to the ending. given the information there, if you want a happy ending-- it's there. there's twists enough with plenty of things that were setup throughout the story. there's meta for the people that followed the project for years and felt part of it. there's a sadder perspective to the ending-- which you mentioned is that the epilogue never happened and was just written by the listener at zack's requestion. then there's the deeper perspectives in that the story was told to us by the listener and was neither his story or zacks but was both of them smashed together and braden was a mixture of the guy both of them fell for. hell, someone surprised me not too long ago by coming up with a really dark perspective on the ending that zack didn't see braden in the train station because it was braden's ghost and i was like whaaaaaat. then i got to looking at the facts and yeah... there's enough room there that you could go tragic supernatural with it (that perspective was an accident but it's objectively wild). so yeah, most VN's let you make choices in the project to affect the ending. in this one, the choice is made inside your head . i think, as a creator of something and never having done anything like this in my life, it was more rewarding for me to see the fan buzz on the ending and all the perspectives or people going back through to reread and catch things they missed.

last point is sequels: none planned right now. i set out to zack's story and his quest for self-acceptance and that's what i did. i'm open to a sequel if i have the energy but my requirement is that it needs to be as good if not better than the original. i dont want the run the story into the ground. i'll also note that a sequel will effectively destroy the hard work on the ending here because it would force a perspective and take all the other interpretations away and that's a massive amount of damage to do to a story. i'm fine knocking walls down but i need to make sure something pretty is built in their place

:)