June Ideas, Dreamsmith, and Patreon Changes (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

First up I want to say thank you to everyone who sent me well wishes and kind words during my time off. As some of you may know from experience or from seeing friends go through it, being self employed can be a stressful experience and it can be very easy to burn out.

Thankfully, after a wonderful hike along Loch Lomond and up to Fort William and a month off to just let my mind and body recover, I'm ready to get back into the thick of things!

At the start of next month I'll be heading to the UK Games Expo which is back to its usual size. Hopefully that means more sales but who knows. I'll be honest and say that I'm actually more intimidated by it now than I was last year when I exhibited for the first time. I guess because I now have a bar to subconciously measure success against.

Also, thanks to scratch off ink having a shelf life of around 6 months, I won't have any copies of The Dig which is a darn shame as conventions seem to be where it did best.

After the Expo I'll be hand folding 300+ maps and getting all the Apawthecaria Kickstarter orders out. Which sounds like a lot but its actually about 1/3rd of the usual Kickstarter fulfillments I've had to do so that's nice.

Patreon Changes

I've had a few dozen people pop in at the £3 tier, download everything, then cancel their subscription which is just a risk Patreon runs but it is pretty infuriating.

I'm not about to start imposing anything because, truth be told, I have no idea how to combat that sort of behaviour and at the end of the day, better I get £3 than my games just end up on some 4chan fileshare.

But I have been having some thoughts about how I use Patreon and how I feel about other creator's decisions and I've decided to put a few changes in place:

• Early Access - Personally, early access has always been a bit of a bugbear of mine. I despise it when consoles and Epic Games do it as it forces me to split my game libraries when I'd rather keep everything together in one place.

So starting in June, expansions and monthly games will be going up for general sale at the same time as they go up on Patreon. Games that are getting put out in a sort of unfinished state like a few of the DELVE expansions and how Shimmersnow Valley was at first are an exception to this but generally, everything, everywhere, all at once.

• Value Change - As you lovely lot have continued to pour in, the general value of each expansion I've made has increased. Mostly this can be seen in the Apothecaria expansions as they've crept up to nearly 40 pages and sell for about ~£7.

The shrewd business thing to do would be to increase the cost of each tier but I'm not going to do that as that would feel like a slap in the face of all your support.

I sat down a few times this month and tried to think about this and at the end of the day I kept coming back to the same conclusion:

Your support is what matters, not how much you're giving.

I had been grappling with the idea that there needed to be some sort of tangible difference between the £3 and £5 tiers but really the difference is that money is different for all of us and £5 in the UK is worth less than it is in say Brazil. 

So I'm not going to increase my prices despite the advice of many Patreon websites and successful Patreon Creator blogs and instead just keep thinking of it as pay-what-you-want in that regard. Cause honestly, I love creating and I'm just so happy that you think my games are worth supporting.

• Discord - I found out today that you can link Patreon to Discord and have done so but as some of you have pointed out, Patreon just stuffs you in without asking and may keep putting you back in. If this is the case, I'm very sorry and we can try work out a fix.

The purpose of the Patreon/Discord link is to give you all a place to discuss things that happen here and to let me be a little more chatty. Comments work well and I'll still be active in that regard but an actual chat can go a long way in sharing ideas, getting a feel for what people are interested in, and it means I can do voice chat Q&As :)

But that's all boring logistical stuff so let's talk Patreon Expansions and Dreamsmith!

Dreamsmith

I had hoped to kick things off with a map of the world but it turns out cartography is a) quite hard and time consuming and b) expensive to commission. Like over a thousand pounds level expensive so the map will have to wait for now until I can learn to make one myself.

In June, my goal is to start making the profiles for the different character careers and hopefully commission art for some of them but Dreamsmith is going to be sorta intermittent and shared whenever I've got stuff to show off.

At this stage, I'll be designing the setting for use with my own Those Who Play system and the Troika! system but knowing me, I may end up creating a custom system for it so it can be used standalone in a way that brings out the weirdness in a more engaging way.

June Expansion

It feels like every time I want to make an ambitious expansion, I end up slammed with other commitments but I really, really want to make the Maker's Market expansion so that's going to be my June (and potentially a little bit of July if it takes longer than expected).

Maker's Market is a Downtime focused expansion for Apothecaria which gives your witch things to do that aren't just making potions and curing folk. Take up woodworking, blacksmithing, sculpting, spellcraft, tailoring, baking, or painting with loads of new Materials and Commissions. 

The base system is the same, you get a Commission (Ailment) which has a number of [TAGS] and have to find Materials (Reagents) to fulfill those [TAGS]. But, in the interest of creativity, you have a lot of freedom with which Materials you choose.

As you fulfill Commissions, you'll get interesting events like: make a Wedding Dress for one of the villagers and you get an invitation to the wedding. Build a suit of armour for the Baron's friend and it'll stop attacking you so often! 

There will also be templates that can be completed as a way to undertake projects on your witch's downtime that you can sell at the monthly Maker's Market in High Rannoc.

And finally, each craft comes with its own Masterpiece that can be made once you've done a set number of Commissions or Templates. These are things like a Gingerbread Cottage for the Baking craft, a Heroic Weapon for the Smithing craft, or a painting so good that it allows you to enter the Painted World.

Thanks for reading and apologies if it came off too serious at any point! 

Love,

Anna