patreon update

So, the twine game has a release candidate version out. I'm collecting a big list of fixes, as well as handling the final bits of writing and editing needed; after that's all done I'll be posting it to itch.io. It's basically done! Finally!

So now's the time to post some stuff about the future of this patreon.

The short version is, I'm planning on moving to a more regular update format and making some more twine games, with a focus, at least in the next few months, on much shorter and more self-contained games, and maybe easing in to writing any bigger projects.

The plan is to have a poll every two months about which project to work on, and have a monthly release of an up-to-date build for the $7 tier and a public version that's a month delayed.

The $4 suggestion box tier, which has pretty barren in terms of content, would be for pre-planning for polls, where I'd post misc worldbuilding, super rough drafts, or requests for comments for various potential options and use that to tweak what shows up on the actual polls.

So for example, as I've been finishing up this twine game I've also been putting together drafts for a few different games I might work on next -- I have a few main ideas, two of which I've written rough demo concepts/mechanics tests for, and a bunch more side ideas that I haven't fleshed out much. I'd post all those to the $4 tier and ask for people's thoughts, and revise and expand different ideas based on the response, and then post the revised stuff when I make the $1 poll a few weeks later, and the winner of that poll would become the project I'd work on for two months that would get regular monthly releases. This first poll would be a pick between different new projects, but after that there might be things like, different directions of expansions, like sidequests or further main plot or more random encounters or whatever, in the poll options.

Basically this is me trying to restructure my work flow so I can work on projects in smaller, more coherent chunks, with more regular updates.

Also I've been thinking about what rewards I could add that I'd actually use / that other people would actually be interested in, in terms of patreon tiers, so if you have any suggestions feel free to share them. Something I was thinking about was... like, I could start up a discord server? I didn't before because it seemed, you know, rank egotism, and also then I would have to moderate a discord server, which seems like a nightmare. But I've seen a few other patreons this size have associated discords, with ~pledge tiers~ or w/e, so if that's a thing people have been interested in I guess I could set it up. I'm not exactly the most chatty person though, as you've all maybe noticed.

About HELL GAME... we'll see. I mean, don't get your hopes up. I've picked at the code some, and the problems that got me to stop working on it are still there. But I've done some editing to try to get out of the code mess it's in -- basically in order to write in scenes that aren't just one-off contextless sex scenes, I need better event code and NPC support, and to know what better event code would even look like, I need to write some sample quests, and in order to write some sample quests I need a better idea of what a generated quest would look like laid out on the map, and in order to lay things out on the map I need way better map generation code, and specifically event placement clusters on generated map sectors. So I worked on map generation some. But like, it's a long, long road from there to even the most basic visible-to-the-player interaction, and that huge distance is why I put the code down. I might continue picking at the code in the future as I work on other projects, but, don't hold your breath for another HELL GAME update ever. I guess I might release the code at some point, if other people want to work on it? As always it's kind of a giant hacked-together mess, though, so I don't know how useful that would be for anybody; you can't really just drop in scripts.

Also once I for-real finish the twine game I'm gonna switch the patreon title over from "making hell game" to "making gay monster porn games" + redo the intro blurb, I guess. Basically any hell game stuff in the future should be considered a special bonus, unless I say otherwise.