Hiatus is almost over (Patreon)

Hi guys,

Just wanted to give you all an update for those that aren't active on the Discord server (which you totally should join, if you haven't already, by the way). 

This past year, I've been working on my Honours exegesis (I'm a composer by trade). This has meant that I've had precisely diddly squat time to spend on Eigengrau's.

Fortunately, there is a light at the end of the tunnel- I will be finishing my exegesis in a month, graduating (I hope), and then becoming free once more to commit more time to Eigengrau's.

I will be approaching it as a potential career; the fine folks over at GMBinder, Legend Keeper, and various other online roleplaying tools have shown that it is possible to work on these sorts of projects full time. I'm considering launching a Kickstarter as a sort of boost to keep the lights on- this would be contingent on me being confident that I'd be able to deliver all of the features that I advertised. 

I would like to assure you that I will never make Eigengrau's pay-for-play, ad-supported, or any such thing- Eigengrau's Generator will always stay totally free, with no features pay-gated, and as much of the content open-sourced as possible (licensing for things like adventures might not be open sourced).

That being said, I want to be able to make Patrons feel as though they are getting value for money. I'm investigating several areas of adding more value to the existing product, and creating free core features with 'premium' benefits- again, I don't want to go down the hole of making people feel as if I'm nagging, or that they are getting an incomplete product. Eigengrau is a mad wizard, but he's not cruel. But I also have rent to pay!

What this all means in practice is that I'll be committing fully to porting Eigengrau's over to React, and trying to spruik it at every available opportunity- any festivals, competitions, awards, or other funding opportunities are what I'm after. I didn't know that the Ennies were a thing, and I'll be submitting it for 2020. If you guys know of any (preferably in Australia, or accessible for an Australian/American citizen residing in Australia), then that would be amazing. 

Currently, Eigengrau's runs entirely client-side. This is super handy for those that don't have internet connections or like to keep their tinfoil hats screwed on tightly, but it has the major downside of being limited to the hardware that it's run on. Server-side PDF generation is much simpler to implement, and while my hosting costs are next to nothing currently, the migration to React also lends itself well to a fresh start as a service; I would feel comfortable with multiple online saves being a 'premium' feature. Linking towns together would also be an acceptable pay-gated feature. Reducing the amount of content available, or limiting Drow to premium only would not be acceptable. Server-side content also would mean that integration with things like deep machine learning algorithms like GPT2 would be possible (but please don't interpret that as me saying that that is a feature that's coming soon).

I'm so grateful for you guys staying on board when there's no active development- you've let me have a nice bottle of wine to unwind at the end of every month, which has been wonderful.