First, Teary is still alive also from another situation, about a week ago a bot on his Discord server left an
Everyone tag in a voice channel, and he briefly joined it in an attempt to get rid of that notification (he got played hard, you can just right-click the channel and "mark as read" without joining, dude just trolled himself there).
Keep in mind his last update in early December (when he missed his final promised deadline so far) was that, since he missed it, he'll from there on out keep working on the game and stop "reading messages
and logging in" until he's done (so he shouldn't even have seen that notif, much less joined the voice channel to get rid of it).
Basically, he's either pulling an exit scam, or he's just lazy beyond belief and will return when he starts to get a feel of losing Patreons.
Game is still not officially Abandoned, but as with most unofficialy-Abandoned games, I recommend never relying on game ever updating and finding other games to play in the meanwhile (and just be pleasantly surprized if this game ever updates again).