Announcement about some changes to the dev cycle (Patreon)

Hey everyone, I hope you're doing alright today :)

I wanted to make an announcement to how the development cycle of Conway will look going forward. So currently we've got the monthly releases, with the first of the month always bringing in a new version of the game.

Going forward we will extend that to a 2 month cycle.

Why?
I actually don't mind the 1 month cycle much. It keeps me on my toes, i got some days for planning, got some days for art, potentially writing if i'm doing some that month, couple days to implement it all and off it goes. It keeps the game fresh in people's mind with new stuff very frequently, but it does come with its downsides as well.

1. the updates tend to be frequent, but small. 1 or 2 scenes with my goal so far always being to try to reach 10k words, with anything above being a bonus. Sometimes that worked out, other times it didn't. That isn't always a problem, but for example this upcoming update includes a very much optional julian scene and nothing else. Soooooo, for many people it might just add literally nothing, since it only shows up with certain stats and having gotten certain scenes.
So a two month cycle will just mean larger updates to make each of them just feel more substantial.

2. It'll hopefully make the flow of things a bit smoother and allow for a little more freedom. Currently the month is rather locked down. 1st is upload day, then roughly until the 5th is planning and administration. Then comes a chunk of just working on things until about the 25th, which is the cut-off date for me to implement things and prepare the update.
Stretching that to a 2 month schedule will likely cut down on some of the administrative days and of course i don't have to do the whole release prep quite as often (with the exception of the patreon version, more on that later).

3. Somewhat less stressful maybe? I mean still need to get an update out that feels like it justifies the timeframe of 2 months. But as you can see in the schedule, there isn't really a lot of time to muck around, and when, for example, a painting just doesn't work out? Well all of a sudden things look rather tight.
And not just in case things go wrong, but simply in case of life happening. With updates taking a month how does december look? My family isn't crazy for christmas, mind you, but still, if you've got around 30 days to work with, taking away a couple of those makes a large impact.
Same with cons. That's a week that's just gone.
So spreading stuff across two months will have these events impact an update less.
Like, if an update for some reason comes 5k words short of the target, a 15 or 20k update probably is still fun to dig into.  A 5k one though? Ehhh, that's probably a skip.

That's why I want to see how it goes with a 2 month schedule for each update.

So do we just get updates less often?
That's the fun bit, at least for the 5$ and above folks the answer is no.
The plan is to still provide you with a monthly supporter update. That one just will be rougher around the edges. There'll be more frequent situations where scenes aren't full finished, art or sounds might be missing. You know, basically just taking whatever is there at that moment without worrying too much about public presentability.
This might also allow for feedback to be more readily acted upon (and asked for in the first place), because the sections that have been added in the patreon update are still actively being worked on, and it's not immediately onward to the next thing because the next update calls (though of course time will tell how feasible it all turns out to be).

So all in all for Patreon there won't be an substantial changes. You still keep the 1 month early-access to updates. You'll still keep the monthly update rhythm, just with it becoming a rhythm of one month having a finished update, and the next month having a WIP update.
For example, we'll have update 9 coming up as planned for the 1st of november.
1st of december would be the WIP update for update 10.
and 1st of January would be the finished update 10.

As for the 2$ tier, of course you are still tied to the public release, so these will be less frequent. But  one thing i've so far struggled with is providing opportunities to give some sneak peeks to you all. Again, there's only so much i can do in an update, and much of it will only come together at the very end of a month.
So i think with a 2 month cycle there should actually be better opportunities to provide actual sneak peeks and some little bits and bobs of what the next update will bring.


How's that sound? Sounds like a plan? Or what do you all think of it?