I understand the hardships that comes with trying to get people to support a solo game dev/small team. But I think having people try out your game and having them do nothing for extensive periods of time will only sour their experiences. Which will only make them close the game and forget about it. Having the collection be based on a small minigame would make the collecting a lot more interactive. A tactic I've seen used a lot here on Itch/patreon is a delayed update for the free version. For example having $10 patrons get the newest update immediatly, while $5 patrons only have to wait 2 weeks and the version will only be released for free a month after release. Also giving certain options to patrons only using a code for example is also a neat way of getting support. I've seen things from cheat menus, the option for futa/impregnation, customizing/changing character appearances and xray vision be locked behind a patreon subscription and people are willing to pay for those things
I'm at kind of a pivotal moment with the game, because I'm honestly quite burned out with the outrageous hours I've been working to make it, combined with the game severely missing my growth expectations for several releases in a row.
Your advice is extremely solid and helpful. I may need to take a brief break to recharge my battery, but I am going to try to take this to heart.
Specifically, I'm going to:
* Consider significantly shortening the failure delay. Maybe more like 1 minute for free players?
* Start doing delayed updates for free players, but continue to give away the vast majority of the content
* Trying some different ideas for Patron content. I've already got a development console in the game that opens when you hit tilde, but I've got most of the useful commands disabled when it's not running in the Unity editor. I use it constantly when testing out new code and content. It would be easy to use build flags to enable some (or maybe even all) of them for patron builds. I could also build a cheat menu if people would prefer the accessibility.
* I was planning to do some additional outfits for patrons, so I think I may already have this on the roadmap, it just hasn't been implemented yet. But hearing you echo something that I've already been considering is encouraging.
* Futa and impregnation are interesting options. I suppose they'd be easy to implement with the outfit system, but getting them into dream fragments would be a little more demanding with art. But it's possible. If it drives some patrons my way then it could be worthwhile.
I think you may have just convinced me to stick with this game for a while longer. I really can't express how much I appreciate the advice.
EDIT: After further consideration, I’m going to try the mini game idea and get rid of the wait times. I’ve got an idea for how to get a lot more lewd content into the game with it.