Thank you for reaching out with your concerns! I appreciate the constructive criticism. I do agree that we were unprepared to create visual novels, you are right that there is a steep learning curve that was a bit unexpected. Parival actually did start with a bunch of us being friends, and yes, we do contract freelancers since we do not have legal 'partners'. Many of these freelancers are doing this as a hobby as well, and have a personal life, work, school, etc. outside of working with us. I don't really expect Parival to become a huge company by any means, so I think it's okay to give the freelancers we hire some leeway. For the initial release of the side game, it was my fault for setting it so far back. I did not expect that it would take as long as it did to get out, so I do apologize for that. Some reasons why I don't always hire someone new for certain things is because a person I work with could have experienced a death in the family, could have struggled with their living situation, etc. My team is important to me so I want them to be in a good head-space when they work on the game and I don't want to fire someone just because a grievance occurred in their life. As far as the funds for the side game go, those funds came out of my pocket since it was something that I wanted to make initially. All of the funds from the kickstarter are still going into 1D's main game.
For updates, I don't think there is an issue with adding a personal tone in the writing. I'm not opposed to excluding it if need be, but I like to let everyone know what's going on and how I feel about things. I understand if some people might not like that, but they are welcome to skip the bits that they don't want to read. I'm still learning what people want out of the updates and am open to suggestions.
Looking back, I do wish that we started with a smaller project. You're right that we'll be using 1D as something to learn from. When we make any games in the future, I'll be sure that the majority of the work will be finished or close to finishing before we even think about having a kickstarter or something of the sort. That way I'll be able to judge when a feasible release date would be. It was difficult to judge initially for 1D because we hadn't made a game before and weren't 100% sure what assets we needed. On top of that, 1D has also massively increased in size, which we weren't prepared for from the kickstarter. I wish that we had taken even just another year to develop it before we had the kickstarter.
I hope I was able to answer some of your concerns, and I do hope that you'll be able to trust Parival with future games. I really do agree with you that we were unprepared, and unprofessional with delays, but I hope I was able to explain my reasoning. I'm learning as a game developer and I'm sure in the future I'll end up being more strict with how I run things. I know I've made many mistakes with developing 1D, and I acknowledge that. Feel free to reach out again if need be, we really appreciate constructive criticism.