August 13 Update (Patreon)

Before the main topic, some housekeeping. Earlier this week, I put out another art post for $10 backers. Above this post, you see a lovely piece of artwork from Annikath's Twitter! This isn't from me, so it's either someone else's request or her own fanart. Anyway, I quite like it - consider it canon that when Hilstara is pushed to such a degree, after the battle her allies reward her with some relief. ^-^

Anyway, this week I want to discuss something with everyone. I work best when I can shift gears periodically, which means I'm always bouncing around. That includes small amounts of work on things I never mention, which in an ideal world suddenly appear as new complete projects.

One of my longest-running side projects is Don't Save the Princess... actually, there's been so much patron turnover, maybe I'd better link the free online demo for the game. It was meant to be a short and light project, tapping into the casual phone games market. Instead it has lingered and malingered for years, to the point where in the past I've considered just scrapping it, which I do not like to do.

The decision point came when I needed to do some work in order to delegate assignments to the artist, which required replaying some of the game. Since that would take me mentally away from other work, I had been putting it off. But when I fired up the build... I ended up playing longer than necessary, because I was enjoying it. I know it's not for everyone, but my feeling while playing was that I did hit the note I wanted, making a new sort of gameplay that strikes the right casual balance.

So: DStP is not dead. But what will happen to it? Well, that's part of what this post is about.

I've done some work in the background, mostly design - honestly, this has been such a relief on stressed days when I don't feel like I have the energy for anything. There are a reasonable number of variations we can get on the physics that are already in the game, different ways to give new twists to levels without coding brand new features. So some of this will be moving forward.

At some point, however, this work will hit a fork in the road and I'll need to decide how much to invest. While thinking about this, I considered a new idea: using Kickstarter as a test. This is the idea I want to discuss, but first some background information.

I've considered crowdfunding at various points - not because the money is strictly necessary, but because successful campaigns are one of the only ways that indie games can get attention. I'm concerned about seeming like I'm "double dipping" from patrons, and as I've always emphasized you guys don't owe me everything after all your support, but I think that a crowdfunding campaign has potential advantages.

Most notably, it would be a test of the fundamental concept and design against a far larger number of eyes. How many people are interested would help me decide about that fork in the road: if relatively few people care, I can wrap up DStP as a small and modest project, but if new players show up, I can invest in some of the more expensive improvements or expansions I've been considering.

(It would also have the advantage of testing out and establishing myself with crowdfunding. A small project would let me get some rookie mistakes out of the way and also give me a track record, if I ever wanted to try for a bigger crowdfunding campaign in the future. Something like OEA2 or a higher budget RPG.)

There are disadvantages, of course, most notably the time and effort required to run a crowdfunding campaign. This wouldn't be something I'd be leaping into any time soon, that's for sure. But I've been thinking about this enough that I wanted to run it by patrons, both to let you know my thinking and in case you have any thoughts I missed.