Gonna post a "transcript" of Harry Tuff's AMA for people who don't use discord or missed the date.

Harry Tuffs:
Hello everyone! I'm here to begin the AMA. Ask anything you like about HOMD, the development process, or anything else, and I'll answer to the best of my ability! My answers might come through sporadically as I jump away to eat dinner/deal with my cats/pick up my wife from the station/whatever, but rest assured I'll get to everyone's questions and answer eventually (in text form - I'm much more coherent in text than in voice anyway).
Also this is a fairly informal process - if there's enough interest, I suggest we leave the channel open throughout the day tomorrow, and I can hop in and answer questions then too. 🙂

Question 1:
why cant you "romance" the shark?

HT:
Ha, I love that this is the first question. In retrospect, I definitely should've let players romance the shark. But at the time, I was trying very hard to make sure that the romance dialogues reflected the characters' personalities as I saw them, and Penpusher was so shy he would've been put off by any awkward fumbling involved in overcoming the difficulties of human/carchar romance. My mistake was to write that the player and Penpusher were "biologically incapable" of pursuing a relationship, which any dedicated furry would tell you was wrong for those with sufficient imagination. This is one thing I would probably change if I were to ever return to the game.

Question 2:
What plans, if any, did you have for Sainthood features?

HT:
My memory's a little fuzzy on this, but I wanted Sainthoods to unlock new late-game stories, specifically in corresponding locations (Fractal Fortress for Anglecrab, for example), which would give lucrative rewards. I also wanted to add a smattering of dialogue options which would allow players with Sainthoods to bypass certain difficult challenges (e.g. a Scorthidion saint could beat the Arena in Carapas by tanking the gladiator's hits, their wounds scabbing over instantly). In the end, as with so many plans, I ran out of time and money before I could do this.

Question 3:
Would you have added more to the Empire of Thread if development had been a little less hectic?

HT:
Oh, definitely! New Draden would have had a whole follow-up quest where you delve into the Mirrorwise and work out what went wrong with their conquest. There also would've likely been some extra "Wander the streets" type events, where you could see more snippets of Empire life and receive hints about the life and assassination of the previous Imperator. I never planned to show anything beyond the Empire gate, though - I always wanted that to remain a mystery.

Question 4:
In a hypothetical scenario where you managed to finish all the stuff in AHOMD’s files, would you have added anything else?

HT:
My plans were absurdly over-ambitious and likely would have fuelled an extra year of development, but my time and money and resolve all ran out in early 2017. One thing I would've definitely done is add WAY more variations of the various "overworld" interactions when you're travelling through rooms. (As a side note, these were all added in a single insane week when I realized that the travel was way too boring but I had less than a month before the game came out.)

Question 5:
How are you doing? I know you worked on Over the Alps a while back, but besides work what sorts of stuff are you up to? (Don’t answer this one if you don’t want to)

HT:
I'm doing very well, thank you, and actually working on a fun project at a new company called Tributary Games! I co-founded Tributary with Sam Partridge, who I met at Failbetter and with whom I worked on Over the Alps. We've got a big announcement coming in mid-July, so keep your eyes peeled - the game is a very different beast from HOMD, but rest assured, it's narrative-heavy and full of stories, as you might expect from one of my games.
(Addendum: It's really nice to be working on a game with a team of more than 10 people. I can focus on the writing, which I love, and leave the coding to professionals.)

Question 6:
Good evening, Harry! I worked a lot on bugfixes for HoMD this year and noticed that pretty much all the bugs and crashes stem from various mix-ups with variables. And there are A LOT of variables in your game. I imagine it was a real headache to keep track of them all. So my question is - was GameMaker the only game engine you considered at the start of development, and do you now regret picking it for your first game?

HT:
Hello! Yes, keeping track of the variables was an awful never-ending headache, and it stems from my complete inexperience - I'd never even coded a "Hello World" before I started making HOMD. And it shows, haha, as I chose a bunch of bone-headed structures for the codebase that I was then locked into for the rest of development! Honestly, this is the one of the reasons I didn't go back to HOMD after my initial few patches - I'd always loved writing for the game, but the coding had become unbearable and between my mental health and total lack of money, I just didn't have the time or willpower to dive back into that nightmare spaghetti.

GameMaker was the engine I went with because it seemed - at first - the easiest one to work with. Only later in development did I recognize it had a number of absolutely terrible flaws for working on a project of HOMD's size, especially dealing with textures and text, and Unity would have been a better choice (though I cordially dislike Unity and have always had trouble with it). That being said, I do defend GameMaker in general, especially for smaller solo projects - I think it's a fantastic and flexible engine and, in all honesty, I'm so fond of it that if I ever made a new solo game I'd be tempted to go back. I even have some ideas for how to fix some of the issues I encountered with HOMD, notably integrating Ink to handle the stories.

(As a final side note, thank you for your work on the unofficial patch, fixing many of the issues I didn't. If you ever want someone to look over or even write text for the game, don't hesitate to get in touch - as I said, writing was never the issue with HOMD, it was the coding.)

Question 7:
What was working with Catherine Unger like?

HT:
She is an awe-inspiring human being! I was very new to the games industry back then, and I think 99% of artists would have balked at the sheer number of crazy things I threw at them - can you draw a city made of mirrors? A castle made of kelp? Oh, this one needs to defy all laws of reality and perspective, are you OK with that? And she just tirelessly (and quickly!) churned out these amazing images, always right on time, without ever raising a single complaint or pushing back at all. It's actually kind of superhuman in retrospect, and though I always thanked her effusively, I should've been even more grateful than I was. We conducted all of our business over emails and I never even physically met her until after the game came out - since then, we run into each other occasionally at conventions, and it's always wonderful to see her. She's very chill.

Question 8:
Looking back with the power of hindsight, is there anything that you wish you could have done differently?

HT:
Oh, only about ten thousand things. So many things that it's difficult to sort through all of them and put them down into text - I'm sure I'll remember dozens when I wake up tomorrow. #1 I guess is that I should've let people romance the damn shark!

In seriousness though, I wish I could've worked on the game a little longer before launch, but I just ran out of budget and I needed to be able to support myself. I didn't have any idle wealth to lean on, more's the pity, and I didn't really know how to go about chasing investment or anything like that (which in retrospect, I totally should've done). I also felt an obligation to release "on time" because I felt I owed it to the Kickstarter backers, but again, in hindsight I think they would've totally understood a longer dev cycle. More QA would've been nice - it's actually kind of a miracle the game worked at all, because I was never able to afford a QA team and relied wholly on a very small team of helpful but amateur Kickstarter backers.

Other regrets? More interactions in the overworld map. Finishing off the Sainthoods system, or at least removing it so it didn't waste people's time. Making it too difficult to get certain items (Sanctioned Scripture and Radical Pamphlets spring to mind - you should've at least got a bunch of Sanctioned Scripture for agreeing to be a missionary, and the Society should've been a renewable source of Pamphlets). Not enough "Wander the streets" type events - some locations are too bare-bones, and you're forced to leave them as soon as you arrive. A more polished combat system would've been nice, but again, that just required more time and money. Better tutorialization would've been good too (people dismiss those infoboxes as soon as they appear, and there should've been somewhere to go back and read them again).

Just remembered another regret... There was intended to be much more content for the Perennial Distinction. I think the game even tells you there'll be more to do, which is actually a straight-up lie! I added this line early on, all excited, then forgot to cut it when it became clear I didn't have time to add that stuff. I'd intended to add some post-game Perennial storylines after launch, but obviously ended up stepping away from the game instead.