To put in my two cents as somebody who's been running a porn game patreon for ~6months now:
Ultimately to make a game you gotta do the work -- make a design, write code, write text, draw art -- and that's a lot of work. It's very easy to count your eggs before they hatch, but it's also pretty easy (well, depending on your living situation) to just pick away at a thing for years without really accomplishing much or getting any feedback. Definitely consider showing off your project or project plans to some people you know, just so you can get some feedback along the way, and keep you energized about it before your public release.
I had HELL GAME in development for... years? At least two years, working on it infrequently on-and-off, before it got anywhere close to the point of having a playable demo, and even now I still maybe should've let it cook for a while longer before showing it off. Ultimately I just got impatient.
Patreons are seen as the thing to do, but like Void Director said, most people are not making a lot; don't assume it's going to be a major income stream to start or maybe even ever. The money can also complicate things a lot -- there's a reason why I don't have "you get to design content i'll put into the game" as some $20/m, $40/m tiers, because I know that it would lead immediately to people with a lot of money asking for things I wouldn't be comfortable writing, and (for myself at least) that seems like a perfect way to absolutely tank my desire to work more on the game in general. And like splendidostrich said, with a monthly patreon there's some pressure, from yourself if nobody else, to make monthly releases, which means there's an upper limit on how complex the things you can do are. Additionally, you tend to get the patrons that like what the game currently presents as: if your demo is missing big mechanics or setpieces, it's possible that the response once they go in might be "this isn't how I thought development would go, and I don't think this is important". Which isn't to say don't start a patreon, just, be aware that there might be complications if your game is in early development. "Early access to releases" is pretty uncomplicated as a reward tier, though.
The major thing is: just make a game. That's the hardest and most important part; everything else is negotiable.
As somebody whose only major web presence is that of a lewd author, the identity question doesn't precisely apply to me, but also, uh, there's a reason why I use an alias and not my actual name when I'm posting werewolf porn or w/e. If you have a more all-ages identity, it's probably worth it to have at least nominal separation, even if it's an open secret that both your aliases are the same person.
(Also personally I think twine 1.4 is a lot better than twine 2.0; there are a lot of fancy javascript hacks and layout things you can do with twine 1.4 that make it possible to break practically any of the limitations twine has as an engine. Obviously that requires a reasonable amount of knowledge of javascript and of the way twine's javascript itself works, but having an engine ready-made can help development a lot, especially if you know you can hack in some bespoke mechanics if you end up really needing them.
There's an appeal to writing all your own tools, but writing tools is boring and a lot of work, and tends to distract development of mechanics and plot and setting -- the things your game would actually be about -- in favor of extremely fiddly technical problems like "oh how do I implement this graph algorithm in javascript", "what are the precise combination of javascript and css rules to get this fade effect working", "what's the right clustering density for this particle effect", etc. If you can use something like twine or ren'py then absolutely consider it; it could save you a lotttt of effort, especially if you're not already a coder.)
