Patreon Information

So, now's the time's come where RL has calmed down once again and I can do some of this communication stuff with you all!

To talk about A MtF briefly, still working out the first deck (trying to make everything have enough levers and switches to balance initially before going into full production) of Gender TF, but progress is being made! After I have this 'base' then the rest should follow rather easily.

I'm anticipating that by the end of August I'll finish the first deck, September will have a full functioning set of 6 decks, then begins the coding process... which shouldn't be too hard.

Now, onto the fun stuff... Patreon. The silly thing everyone's hopping onto to make a quick buck and cranking out half-arsed games/projects and asking for money...


Alright, so, Patreon: Why?

Two main reasons, and one minor reason.

1. Pay For Multiplayer.
• As is , it's looking like I'll need to afford Unity Plus to have a good base of how many people will be playing (This gives me up to 50 people on at the same exact time playing free vs 20 if I used the Unity for Free). That's $35. On TOP of that, if I go over 50 people (which I anticipate I'll either do on release due to people wanting to check it out OR later on when more things are available), I need to play a cost of $0.50 per GB used that month - according to their calculator, if I had OMG amount of players for this text/card game, that would run around $30 - but a calculator isn't very accurate as to how well my particular game will handle, and the 'next' estimation comes out to around $100 a month instead of $30.
  
  All in all, we're looking at $35-$135 a month for online features, using the base unity system (unless I want to host it myself through another site - a quick glance at that runs a 1-time $45 then hosting a server through Amazon can roughly up to $100 [people on the internet say lower] then the additional $35, so potentially cheaper).
  
  These are estimations, but I'd much rather OVER estimate than underestimate.
  
2.  Art.

• As it is, I want to provide a  unique take on art in general - I want it from the first person view AND third person view. One looking down at yourself (More than likely an exclusive for Alteratio) and the other as if in a mirror (A MtF and if you find a reflective surface in Alteratio). I want to immerse you as much as possible, and I feel looking 'down at yourself' is the way to go... considering this unique way, and all the clothes, hairs, body parts, and tfs that will be in the games, that will require a LOT of art!
  
  Location and creature art is secondary, and some UI art would be awesome, but obviously not as important as the character art, unless I'm told otherwise by you all.
  
•  Minor Reason: As most everyone says, it'd be nice to do this full time - honestly, I don't expect this to happen for at least a year, which will make things somewhat slow in the meanwhile, but it's a goal - heck, even making a physical version of the TF Card Game is a goal! And the system for Alteratio an actual Pen and Paper RPG! I have aspirations I'd love to persue, but obviously working puts a damper on that.

So, Patreon to me isn't a 'oh god, not another one of those'.  It's something that I want to take VERY seriously, and as such I'm doing a few things to enforce that.

First one is that I will be consulting YOU for what reward tiers there should be and what should be on each. Do you all feel you should have 100% access to everything at $0.69? By golly gee, We'll do that! If you feel $5 is fair to be able to have tutorials on how I did things so you can all be entrepreneur game makers in Unity/C#, I'll do my best! I want it to feel fair and not that I'm asking for money - I want to give you all things you ENJOY and WANT to have for supporting the game you (hopefully) like and want to see it come to full fruition.

Second is that I'll be 100% making all documentation of funds public. You will know every single dollar I spend with this money so you know I'm not just wasting it on pizzas or something. You will know exactly where your money is going.

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The only thing that will upset people I put at the end, and everyone is going to hate me for it, but *shrug*.

So, honestly, I don't like MegaUpload, 4Shared, MediaFire... any of those. I'd much rather host the file elsewhere, so the two current choices are that I add a $0.01 patreon to get access to the download to host it there (maybe I can make the link public even though I'm hosting it on patreon? Would mean I don't need a $0.01 option!)
or
Somehow host the file myself on a server I have (maybe the amazon server from above... who knows!).

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Some things that WON'T be done with Patreon:

• Delayed Releases - No 'public' and 'private' release of the games. Always hated the hell out of that myself, and I won't put up with managing two sets of games.

 That's really the main thing that comes to mind, and I really just wanted to bulletin it to emphasize I won't do this. All releases will always be 100% public, or so is my goal. You are paying, if at all, only to see the game become better and more polished. Nothing more or less.

So please don't kneejerk when you see that I post a Patreon eventually.
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One final note: I'll only be posting Patreon when I finish an entire BASE GAME. So, when it comes up, it'll be with a FULL playable multiplayer/singleplayer game. None of this half-baked shenanigans lately.

I hope this fixes some worries and doubts about how I'm approaching Patreon. Thanks everyone for sticking around!