Hi JudgeJuryExecutioner - and welcome!
As Nomad observed, with a small budget and one coder + one artist, it pretty much all comes down to resources, and investing them in such as way as to bring the biggest improvement to the game.
It's unclear if making your own character will be an option yet, as the focus is mostly still on the "need to haves" rather than the "nice to haves". I suspect that naming the character would be as far as it could go. The main reason is that a lot of resources have been put into the illustrations, in which Sam is the most commonly appearing character, and it would be inconsistent if the portrait was different from the model, or the model from the illustration. One likely outcome is to allow you to choose who Sam is, by determining how he reacts to his enemies (i.e. does he kill them, or does he spare them) resulting in two different endings for the game.
It will be the 3 existing gangs for release. A lot of insight into the gangs, their activities, motivations, and mentality is provided through the in game encounters, which are text based encounters, often with choices. I'm a fan of the idea of providing little chunks of information along the way, and letting the reader fill in the blanks, but to give you a quick rundown of survivalists and churchers:
Survivalists: Unified by the belief that human civilization is corrupt, weak, and on the brink of collapse. Built around an ex military core, they are effectively on a resource grab before the lights go out.
Church Of Final Exodus: What the church represents depends one who you ask. A low level acolyte will tell you one thing, a fanatic will tell you something else, and leader will tell you something else. They are the most numerous gang and melee oriented, they produce and distribute a drug called elysium and tend towards low level opportunistic crime, like muggings, theft etc.
@Ushas: The idea of adding a list of criminals through a text file could be an option, will add to the list.
