2021! Changes Planned (Patreon)

December is over, so it's a new year. I've put together something of a plan for reworking my setup here, based on what I've learned over the last year. Some of these are big changes, so they demand some detail.

Major Changes

Narrower Focus

I'm not going to be making sci-fi or modern content anymore. Apologies to everyone who had subscribed just for these, but this split in focus has been causing me so many issues and frustrating my efforts to improve my services that I could write up a whole post on it alone. Focus will be placed entirely on (fantasy)/(natural)/(steampunk)/(pokemon if i can slip it in as a free joke variant because dammit I like it)/(whatever else can be justified as fitting into a fantasy game) content instead.

Because of this, I'll be releasing a free pack containing every single sci-fi map and asset I've made - with the assets re-done and polished to meet my current artistic ability - in the near future. If you were just here for that, I'm sorry, but I hope you can continue to use what I've made in the time I've put in, though.

Changes in Tier Scheme

I'm going to be switching to monthly charge instead of per-item! This actually won't involve much of a change, except that the tiers will get a bit cheaper (a lot cheaper, for the higher tiers). This is because Patreon offers a bunch of additional tools that are completely inaccessible to those that use per-item charges.

In addition to the above, I'm going to reshuffle the tier rewards to make them make a bit more sense.

• Supporter will be set to $3.75 per month, a quarter cheaper now - partially to cover the sales tax that gets slapped on US transactions. All applicable maps will get day/night versions now, plus an extra variant, and I'm moving the grayscale/print map down to this tier, because it seems silly for that to be much higher.
• Enthusiast will be set to $7.50 per month, exactly twice Supporter's and approximately $3.50 cheaper than before. I'm also moving the tokens to this tier! Related to this, because I'm moving to monthly themes for maps, I can produce monthly packs of themed assets instead of weekly ones, allowing me to draw a far greater variety and much more substantial asset packs. One of Enthusiast's variant slots will be replaced with a blank version of the map whenever applicable, too, so that you can decorate it with tokens as desired.
• Benefactor will be set to $11.25 per month, a whole $8 cheaper. To make up for the loss of the tokens, the Benefactor tier will now receive every single overflow variant I make for a map, when there are any. (There are usually a bunch!) They'll also continue receiving the technical files - the raw .kra files for the maps and token assets, and I've been considering extra stuff like "once per month, can request a variant of any existing map", but the real issue with stuff like that is that it doesn't scale, and that if I end up with 100+ Benefactors, I literally cannot fulfill a tier bonus like that, so I'll think about it.

Monthly Map Theme Poll

One of the notable benefits of the change in focus is that I can finally implement a monthly theme. This was a fairly popular idea when I ran polls on it, and personally, as a GM, I suspect it'd be more useful than what I've been doing. Don't worry, this won't nix the variety I usually do! It'll just be more focused.

Enthusiasts will continue to be able to submit suggestions for the next month, but they'll be themes for the whole month. The poll will be for voting on the entire map theme. Pretty straightforward.

Things To Do This Month

Alright, those are the big changes. So what will get done this month, then?

Asset Polishing

I'm going to redraw all of the tokens I've drawn over the last year, starting this week.

All of them.

And maybe even draw some extras, to fill in the gaps. And then I'm going to release them for free, in one big pack. I'm not sure how long this will take - maybe a week, probably no more than two.

Implementing the Changes

Next, I'll be implementing the larger changes from the above, and seeing if it breaks anything - for example, if changing the tier system ruins all of the tags on the older posts. That'd be a problem, but Patreon isn't the most stable platform. The time spent on the asset polish project is also intended to give people the opportunity to drop if they were here for the stuff I'm not making anymore.

Definitive Sci-Fi Pack

After that, I'll put together the futuristic/sci-fi sendoff pack using the newly-polished assets. This probably won't take very long. I'll release it as soon as it's ready.

Extra Weeks & Free Stuff

Switching to a monthly payment system prevents you from charging for half a month's work, so however much work is left in January will probably be free. I was thinking of redoing some of my earliest maps as a sort of book-ends type thing. I think that sounds nice. It depends on whether anything disastrous happens - let's hope it doesn't.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting this project.