The Future of our Patreon Page (Patreon)

Hello everyone,

Phew, it’s been a while since we’ve done this. It has been over a month since our last development blog post. As we were working our way towards launch, we found ourselves so busy, so short on time, and so incredibly stressed out, that consistently writing Patreon Blogs wasn’t very realistic anymore. I want to apologize for that, because I really tried to squeeze in it, but things got crazy.

Now that the launch is finally behind us, we can start returning to our usual schedule when it comes to Patreon. Which... I’m actually really looking forward to!

We finally did it. Together with your help, we’ve launched a major chunk of the game in Early Access (and you should have received a Steam Key if you’ve been with us a while! If not, e-mail us). The positive reception surrounding it has been overwhelming, and I want to talk about all of that really soon. I kept meaning to write a blog post about how our launch went, but writer's block is making that really hard right now. To tell you the truth, I’m tired. Really damn tired. I’ve been working almost constantly for the last couple of weeks, including the week after launch, and to this day I’m still trying to recover from that. It’s been nuts, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that I’ve never worked this hard in my life, ever. Our demo launch was nothing compared to this. We’re all taking it easy for the time being before, slowly, resuming operations again.

This blog post will be short and more of a heads-up. Starting next week, we return to our usual ‘2 development blogs a month’ schedule. Next week, I’ll tell you the story of how our launch went, because oh boy, things were rocky. Awful, even. Did you know we were 5 minutes away from posting a big Apology.png post on Twitter to announce a delay right before launch? I’ll tell you all about it next week!

(To all of our new backers, I usually don't do shitty cliffhangers in our blog posts. I promise this will never happen again.)

What will happen to our Patreon?

The reason I wanted to make this blog post was to briefly talk about this. We’ve been getting new backers recently, which is great, but I’ve started to feel an immense sense of guilt not saying anything. Which is just rude of me, given your importance towards this game! We’ve consistently provided updates here for almost 3 years, and not doing so anymore just felt wrong.

Given our commitment towards making 2 more (shorter) chapters, we still need some way of funding, so Patreon is still crucial to our sustainability and the finalization of the game. With the majority of the game being available right now, I’ve been trying to figure out where to go with our Patreon page. Selaco is in Early Access, so we owe it to all of our players to inform them about the state of the game on a regular basis through public Steam Blogs. That’s the point of Early Access, after all.

But, given how you guys are actively supporting the game, you deserve a little extra. So we found a great way to still justify development blogs. So, here is what will change:

• Development Blogs will continue, but with more emphasis on behind-the-scenes stuff and the inner workings of the systems we are working on. Public Steam posts will be far less detailed and a lot more straightforward. Basically:

  • Steam: “We made this!”

  • Patreon: “We are going to make this, here is how, here is why, this part was fun to make, this part sucked, here is what we want to improve". We will announce things in detail a few weeks before showing a simplified version on Steam. Most of the Chapter 2 related stuff will be exclusive to Patreon. Not all, but most.

• Rewards are going to be revamped. Now that the game is out there, not all rewards make perfect sense anymore. I don't have any more to share about this yet, but we’ll have more news shortly! We refuse to not reward our backers with new stuff as we enter our new phase.

• There will be more emphasis on doing private beta tests with our backers before rolling it out to the public. This means you get everything earlier than anyone else! Again, more details ASAP!

Conclusion

That’s all for now! I know this isn’t a whole lot and that we usually talk a lot more, but I really need a break. I’m going to take it easy this week, perhaps read a book, maybe reorganize the office for a fresh new look, buy some plants, I don't know. I’ll see what comes my way. 

I’m super excited to start working on Chapter 2. It’s going to be fun, and now we feel a lot more at ease given how the base game is already out there. We understand the game way better than we did before, and now we can lean into that.

I truly appreciate all of you for sticking around and continuously supporting the project. I hope you take a moment to realize that you've made all of this possible.

Here is to a new phase of Selaco. Here is to you! 💙

Wesley de Waart