Hey, hey, appreciate you taking the time to write down your thoughts!
Yeh, the Sam face is mostly a leftover at this stage and will get rectified with a general overhaul for the character graphics sometime in the future. Just was the first character that got their art, so I ended up experimenting a little, trying to see what works, etc., moved on, and later realized it doesn't look that great. Just wasn't egregious enough of an issue to get addressed yet.
And no, it's not quite a 1-person production anymore. It was, initially, but since then I've had the chance to bring on some writing help here and there through the Patreon funding. So it's probably more of an 80:20 split currently, with a handful of scenes in the recent updates being written by people other than myself.
And as for your last paragraph, yeh the start is certainly worse for it, simply due to the introductory nature and me just learning my way around programming a VN in the first place. So it basically grows more complex the further you get into it. There might be some restructuring for day 1 at some point but we'll see. Nothing concrete just yet beyond vague thoughts that don't have too high of a priority currently given the available hours to work on it.
When it is finished you HAVE to put this video game on Steam, I mean... it really has a level that deserves to be put there and everywhere. There are a good number of furry VNs on Steam, like Moon Fire (which is still in development but a demo is already offered with the first 2 chapters and is promised to be completed by early 2024) or The Hayseed Knight (which has an atypical artistic/technical level focused on transitions and voice acting of the characters... but sadly it chose to have too much of a comedy tone that makes it difficult to take the plot or the characters seriously).
I've seen that most VNs are $5 there, others that offer more mechanics like being mixed with a card game or a kind of environment exploration/interaction like RPG maker style or a bit of 3D are around $10.