New Year, New Changes (Important! Tier Pricing Update Notice) (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

Happy new year, hope everything’s been going well for you so far! Despite some obstacles on our end, things have been going very well, too. In fact, Dev and I are just about finished with the immigration process to move him over here to the States. By March at the latest, we should officially be living together 2 years after our wedding, hehe…

On the other hand, though, this is a huge change in our lives. It’s also a big increase in our cost of living, so we made the really hard decision to adjust our Patreon reward tiers once more to try to find the right balance of providing you value for your pledge. Going forward, these are what the new tiers are going to look like:

• $5 (Zephyr Tier): Access to exclusive Patreon builds and progress reports
• $10   (Squall Tier): All of the above, plus your name in the Patron credits, early access to short stories, and the OST download links
• $15   (Tempest Tier): All of the above, plus your name in Gold in the Patron credits, and behind the scenes previews of the unannounced project, and additional benefits to be expanded on in the future

The biggest change, as you’ll notice, is that Gallery builds aren’t here anymore. That’s because we decided that the best way to increase the value of your pledge is to include Gallery content in the regular Patreon build. Moving forward, any short stories we write will be in the PDF format for about two months exclusive to the Squall and Tempest tiers before they get coded into the general build. We’ll also be increasing the output of short stories, as we’ve found them to be an interesting way to delve deeper into the characters’ lives and a good way to increase the value of higher pledges. We might also poll higher tier patrons to help us decide which short story to write next!

Dev and I are also in the process of concepting out a new project, one that’ll serve as a sort of “palette cleanser” that we’ll juggle in between Santa Lucia updates when we need a break from it. Previews for the new project can be accessed at the Tempest tier when they become available.

The next hard decision we’ve had to make is that starting in 2024, we’re shifting away from the monthly build drop schedule. The both of us have started to burn out, and 2023 was an extremely tough year for us working on the game, especially with the monthly cycle starting to cause relationship strain between us. We’ve taken a step back to see how other teams have handled their build cycles, and we seem to be one of the very few still grinding away at a consistent monthly schedule, with us currently sitting at over 4 years straight of this.

It has taken its toll on us and we feel we can start outputting much higher quality content if we’re given the cushion room to do so. It’s not going to be a hard and fast rule, but ideally we’ll be putting out builds every other month (whether it be for Santa Lucia or our unannounced project). We also plan to write up progress reports for the off months so that we’re keeping you all on the same page with us.

Sorry for the inconvenience and I appreciate your understanding!

~Dzahn