400 PATRONS! (Patreon)

We have reached the 400 Patrons!!

Thank you very much, it really means a lot to us.

400 patrons is actually an important number because it was the condition for Stewy to be able to stop his current job and be able to concentrate only on the development of the game, which will help us a lot.

Of course, we don't yet know how many patrons we'll have next month, but we remain confident, and I'll be the next to quit my job if we get enough help. We are both very passionate about what we create and we sincerely hope we can work on video games full time.

The production of this game was fraught with pitfalls, both in terms of everyone's schedule and the financial aspect. Here is a little bit of how (globally) the production of the game has been going since the end of the Kickstarter: Stewy, being a freelance, reserved 50% of his time for the production of the game and 50% of the remaining time for the lessons he gave. and other contracts. I worked on the game on weekends and during the holidays. We have never seen our family and friends so little! COVID hasn't changed much here. Of course, this is a choice we had to make if we wanted the project to progress properly. The money we reached from Kickstarter paid some months of the production, which really helped us, but to be honest, it was impossible to live with 15k euros with our 2 rents for 2 years.

How we (almost) fail our game launch ^^'

If you follow us on Twitter, you must have seen that the game's release didn't go exactly as planned. It's been several months since we planned to launch our Patreon to put exclusive access to the game: Yes, Robin Morningwood Adventure was not supposed to be for sale on itch.io as it is today, at least not before it was finished. We thought Patreon was the perfect platform to release our game which is still in production, like thousands of independent video game studios are doing.

We had been preparing for several months, the release of the game we spent over two and a half years making.

If you don't know Patreon as a creator, here's how a launch works: when you finish creating your page, it must be submitted for validation before it can be published. It can take a few minutes up to 10 days according to some forums.

The first time we had our page validated, it took exactly 7 minutes before it was validated. What we didn't know is that if you don't publish your page after validation, and change if it's just a single character to your description, (for example, correcting a typo) your page must be resubmitted for validation before it can be published ...

On D-Day, everything seemed ready, and we even got a head start: The launch video that said the game was available on Patreon, check, our exclusive download page via Patreon, check, our Kickstater news which also had a section to celebrate our launch on Patreon, check, the link buttons to Patreon, check, the launch visual on our Instagram, check, the visual and the text of the news Itch, check, ect, ect, ect. Check check check.

We also launched a countdown to let our followers on Tweeter know exactly what time the game would be available. So far so good, isn't it?

...

WELL NO!!

While we were confident that day, Stewy had corrected some typing errors on Patreon a few hours before launch. 15 minutes before our page officially launched, we wanted to get a little head start to see if the link between Itch and Patreon was going right. And of course, you know the rest: The page had to be submitted for validation again. Which took a lot longer than we would have imagined ...

To draw you a picture, here is how we were at that time:

For the next 4 hours, as we got dozens and dozens of messages and tweets asking where the game was, I stood at the computer hoping to get a quick response from Patreon while Stewy searched for a way to kill himself in the living room.

That's how we changed our entire plan at the last moment and the game ended up on sale on itch.io! Stewy edited the video and changed all the visuals and I changed all the texts and links because we still had no news of our page confirmation.

Well, in the end the game launched correctly, and we keep a rather happy memory of that day to mark with a milestone!