It's a year and a half (ish) prior to the events of the game from memory. I never had set dates from when anything takes place, so I don't know where you're pulling July 15 2019 from.
I don't know how far away the next public build is, but the next one will likely be the first one until it goes full release; just need to clean up Dean's route first.
Given no save editor should exist, that's probably why the game crashed. If you're able to access your old device at all, there's a chance your saves are also backed up in %APP DATA%. Failing that, you'll just have to use the skip options available in-game to speed through what you've already seen and get back to where you were.
That's what's planned for the next stage. Dean rewrite is happening on the Patreon side currently and once that's done a lot of things are being culled for expediency.
I'm sorry that you found certain parts of the VN not to your liking. From your critique though, it looks like you went in assuming this was closer to a character drama rather than a mystery thriller, which is possibly where certain parts of the VN felt like they fell flat.
As it exists on current patch for Patrons, I think the explicit stuff is a tasteful fade to black mostly to keep people focused on the more mystery aspects of the game rather than reading it and expecting smut as a payoff. I've written hypothetical smut for the places it would take place for a couple of the characters as a side thing, but nothing like that is planned for full release.
Nothing concrete. Art is currently in the process of being developed and when all the sprites are done they'll be implemented in the version Patreon folks have access to. I imagine at that point I'll throw it up on Steam, but there's no telling when the sprites will be finished just yet.
Correct. There's extended content insofar as epilogues and alike in the Patreon version but as far as it being as a complete story with answers to the mystery and conclusion to the story, this version has all that.
The caveat though is this version is a little behind insofar as some revisions made in the Patreon version both for clarification and QoL in some scenes when it comes to explaining some of the central themes a bit better.
Oh, you're being plenty respectful. I'm just trying to figure out if there's a way to potentially tweak something to make it better without just saying "Sorry, what you're after would take another year of development in rewrites to make it cohesive".
I think if this is the sort of thing you're looking for in an experience, then MAYBE the epilogues solve for this. I went in expecting that my way out of this narrative was to conclude things in a way similar to the game Time Hollow, which may or may not have been a smart move, but without introducing a whole slew of additional concepts (looking at you Uchikoshi) I'm suck wondering if there's a solution at all.
1. Which... would mean everyone should remember? In the current state not even Tyson remembers, this is about as even as we're going to get.
2. Because he goes and doses himself with something that warps his immune system which now makes the medicine a mismatch. I could write that in to be more explicit but I worry that a lot of solutions that equate to "just have someone explain it somewhere" is going to make the wordiness problem worse.
I wonder how much of this problem exists because public demo doesn't have access to the epilogues yet. Though it's hard to gauge just how well received those are too. It feels like I'm being disrespectful to adopt a "If the message of the game didn't resonate with you, there's nothing I can do" mentality; and I'm hesitant to stick to that as my defense.
Shy of a ZTD style ending where everyone remembers everything and comes out of it with a complete character arc into questioning why their affections haven't been reciprocated mess, I don't think there's any better solution I could've taken. Epilogues cover Dave trying to expedite the character arc healing process but he's Dave, so it doesn't go well.
I'll try to be efficient in how to explain this given you haven't been on the server or likely been exposed to anything still in the Patreon version:
1. Canonical means part of the story. That's it. Everything in the game is canonical because of how the time looping works. There's no way to really stress that in-game without exacerbating the already existing problems of my pre-edit script. While the story descend on a finality of a particular romance should not invalidate the others as it took those to get here.
2. Looping back to Day 20 doesn't work. Ignoring that we have a sequel where we need a locked in romance or at the very least lock out certain romances, we're dooming certain people to still die. Namely Roswell because of his illness. The medicine at this point doesn't work on him because of actions he takes on Day 4, so any intervention needs to happen before then.
3. As for why Dave, I have plans to fix that when I remove the Oswin interrogation segment in favor of explaining how quantum mechanics works a bit better. Namely the concept of observance which might help clarify why Dave at all, why Thanatos dying solves things, etc. My concern with this is ending up just like C/Ping a Wikipedia article and the delivery feels dry. -- Also there were talks in the Discord last night again as to how to potentially integrate inputting the final password in Path P to round out the player experience but so far no one (myself included) hasn't come up with a way that makes sense where Dave would know the password.
I guess the thing that I should make clearer in-game is that the mansion is just a means to constrain the boundaries of the test rather than try and keep tabs on everyone over a town. It might be something I can throw into the revised Oswin section, but the idea is that once the experiment is over and Roswell is cured, we don't need the mansion holiday anymore.
1. Not really. A lot of it was scrapped because of scope, but you can get some variations by using the Day 10 password on Sal's route for instance. Beyond that, nothing extra.
2.The CGs shouldn't be repeating, so that's either a display error or a bug that isn't current as of the build I'm working on. As for the missing CGs, those numbers don't line up to the gallery as I see it. You 100% should have progressed through both of those Trauma CGs if you've completed the game, and the missing Memories CGs take place on Dean's route (according to my list anyway) and aren't missable if you've played his route at all.
If you've hit the point when you can unlock the true ending, it tells you what the requirements are. Reloading at a point before then after meeting the requirements should work.
The medals are saved in the persistent data thing in the save files. Or at least it's in the same folder on PC? Copying that across should update the medal count but it could just be formatted differently. I've only heard of this happening once before but I never heard back on if they got it working.
