January HexCorp News Bulletein (Patreon)

Hello, cutie drones and those who have been gifted free tickets to ride on this cool, new conveyor belt! Hex here.

A few things to cover here in the ever-changing landscape of the dronification industry. Do be prepared to download all this information and commit it to memory, my adorable assets.

Potential New Patreon System

Firstly, something actually important about a Patreon change that may or may not be happening. Right now, Patreon always charges on the 1st of month, regardless of when you signed up. Because I have the up front charges on, this means that anyone who signs up towards the end of the month can get charged in quick succession, firstly on the day they sign up and then at the beginning of the next month. A lot of people have this feature switched on, as it prevents scrapers from signing up on your Patreon for free, downloading all of your content and then unsubscribing without paying a penny. The problem with that is that it can leave other people feeling cheated if they don’t realise this is how Patreon works and they get double charged.

Patreon have decided to change this, so that instead when you sign up you’ll then be charged on a monthly basis from that date. This is in line with pretty much every other subscription-based service out there. There’s quite a lot of creators who are angry about this change, because Patreon were incredibly bad at communicating that this is what they were going to do (as usual) and a lot of creators have theirs set up to work with the current Patreon system.

For HexCorp, this shouldn’t be too big of a change, especially given that everyone who is currently signed up and reading this will still be charged on the same monthly basis anyway. I’ll still endeavour to release my photosets/stories on a monthly basis spread out throughout the month and I will still be sending the postcards out for anyone who made a payment during that month.

New Postcard Format

This section mostly applies to those in tier 5 & 6 who are receiving the monthly postcards. I’ve finally almost caught up on them, I’m finalising the latest set today and then I’ll be getting the January set done early next month.

With the January set, I want to try something a little different. About a year ago, I started creating a ‘collaborative choose-your-own-adventure’ Twine game with some other dronification writers from Twitter, titled ‘permutative Industries’. The plot was you take on the role of an agent, infiltrating the industrial factory complex belonging to the mysterious organisation. There were multiple directions you could go, either descending to the factory floor to investigate their sinister dronification processes or to the upper levels to take on the enforcer drones or even the powerful board of directors!

The game never reached an alpha state, mostly because we all had other priorities and Twine is not built to be used as a collaborative tool. That said, I actually wrote a huge amount for it and I still have the framework in place. Rather than release a half-finished Twine game though, I figured I would do something much more exciting with it. A choose-your own adventure where the excerpts are sent not digitally, but via the mail.

Starting with the January set, the first postcard will list the premise of the adventure and the routes you, as the agent, can take. I’ll have a default route for anyone who doesn’t want to play but just likes to read, but for anyone who wants to engage with it you’ll be able to explore the organisation in your own way. All you’d need to do is DM me your action on Patreon, and I’ll continue the story following what then occurs.

This shouldn’t be too difficult for me to do, as I already have a lot of possible responses written up! I’ll keep the facility consistent across the various players’ games too, so if any of you want to discuss where your different routes are taking you to get an idea for how the complex is constructed too, that would be cool too.

Videos

I feel like I need an actual system for how I post these here, as they don’t fall into any of the existing tiers. I’m going to start handling them similarly to the photosets, so that tier 3 get snippets from them and tier 4 get the full videos, however long they might be. 5890 and I are hoping to film a scene soon of it watching a particular swirly image on a monitor whilst I watch it and toy with it, so look out for that!

Stories

This month I did spend a lot of time planning out a new, much larger story. However, I’ve been bombarded with requests to continue and finish Cerebral Exchange, so I am relenting to the collective consensus (that I’m supposed to be in control of) and will continue writing that instead.

For those who have not caught up, all the existing chapters can be conveniently found on the HexCorp site right now! https://www.hexcorp.net/cerebral-exchange

Look forward to me finally getting to the dronification scene, which was probably the worst point for me to stop before.

Patreon Goals

For the longest time, we’ve had a goal on the Patreon which promises vacbed content if we can get to $1,000. Given that I’m going to be posting vacbed content eventually anyway, this goal now feels a bit redundant so I’m going to remove it. I also can’t think of anything to reward you all with based on a monetary checkpoint, because if it’s something cool I could create for all of you I’m just going to make it happen regardless.

And that should be everything! Thank you for reading, good drones. Now get back to your mindless productivity.

- Hex