The board is set. The pieces are moving.

I finally have a date for an operation to excise this hateful tumour in my eye, which means that by the end of April it will all be done, including recovery. The doctor is confident it'll go smoothly, but one can never be 100% sure with these things. Nonetheless, even if the one eye does not function correctly afterwards, the other one is going to be a-okay, which means in May I can finally carry on working on LOTM. With that goal in mind, let's actually talk about the game for the first time in what feels like fucking forever.

I've had nothing but time to think about the game since November (I hate that it'll have been six months by the time I get back to it), which has generated a huge list of ideas for it, all of them awesome. I've also been chatting a lot with my good friends from https://minoh.itch.io/minotaur-hotel (and if you've not played their VN, definitely check it out) who inadvertently gave me some lightbulb moments with how I can smooth out some things.

One of the topics we discussed was the tension between using a platform like Patreon to generate funds for a project, versus the variable productivity of writing. MH, for example, once went a year without an update and then landed a 300k monster. But with a monthly billing cycle, naturally one needs to produce something every month. And while that's not typically difficult, as can be seen by my adoption of the tick-tock model I've always found it easier to work in bigger chunks. You can get more story done, and not just in a words outcome but in a storytelling way. Theme, branches and such all take time to set up, and aren't always visible. And months--the traitorous things--are always the same length. So you end up cutting here and there to get a thing out and it's all a bit messy. My two-month tick-tock cadence felt like the best compromise at the time.

Except, somehow it escaped me that Patreon has a second billing option: per creation. Being charged only when a thing is produced, and not every month. Sadly the option is disabled for me in the settings due to another option I chose ages ago, which is dumb but what can you do. Nonetheless, after this unanticipated sabbatical, the burgeoning weight of all the things I want to write, and lots of thought about how I can maximise value for you guys while also producing as much content as possible, I kept coming back to the per-creation option. It really feels like the right change to make: both from the perspective of getting to sometimes spend more time to release a bigger and more effective build without feeling obliged to have something ready for every single calendar month, and from the perspective of ensuring my patrons get maximal value for the patronage.

So: I will no longer bill for months where I don't produce a full beta build (ie. fully edited and backgrounded). This includes the current "tick" months, the 0.x.5 builds; I will happily still make those builds available to patrons who desire them each month (via Discord) in their raw, incomplete and potentially broken state, but it won't be billed for. This means that, all else being equal, you'll end up paying at most half of what you were paying before. The cheaper costs for my patrons is a nice bonus, but the biggest advantage is that it frees me up to sometimes tackle a bigger chunk of content than I could ever fit into a 2 month period. I still intend to stick to my 15,000 words a month goal, this means that when a build lands, instead of taking 2 months and being 30k it might take 3 months and be 50k. A good example is the current build, 0.3.5; it has incomplete versions of three characters' introductions. It would be much nicer to have completed them all and released that as a build with 60k new words, instead of cutting all of them off at essentially arbitrary points because I had to release a build at the end of that month.

I hope I've explained all that sufficiently well. It would be much simpler if I could turn on the stupid per-creation option in Patreon itself. I've mailed them, maybe they can still help me out. But either way, I feel really good about this change. It decouples my burning desire to work on the game from the relatively mundane work of "oh, end of the month, have to spit out a build". If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to DM me or comment below. 

Other than that, I will see you all (pirate or not) once my medical saga is done. I cannot wait to get back to Paardenrust and to take you all with me.