Internal Release -> Public Release delay will be increased to 2 weeks (Patreon)

I plan to make a change to the release plan for free players: Currently the delay between the internal release of a major update and the public release is 1 day. Starting with 0.13.0 I plan to increase this to two weeks. This does not affect any patrons!

As both the patreon and the game itself grow, there are several issues that can be addressed with this.

Avoiding releasing bugs into the wild. The playerbase has grown rather large and the game is growing in complexity at the same time. And so does my fear of breaking people's saves or having them run into a critical bug. Especially for players that get the game outside of itch. I have seen a bunch of pages which take the public release and then offer the game for download or online play at their own page. This is good for the game as it creates more exposure, but at the same time, it's also bad because these websites aren't guaranteed to offer the latest bugfix build, turning people off the game. 

Money, money, money. I always feel dirty talking about this aspect. Nevertheless, it's an important topic. Checking my itch statistics, in the past, it statistically took about 100-200 downloads to increase the patron count by 1.
However, over time this conversion rate has declined dramatically. Now, the conversion rate is roughly 2000-3000 downloads per patron. Not every download is a new player. As far as I know, itch doesn't filter out players downloading a new version of the game. However, at the same time, as I mentioned in the point above, there are now also plenty of other download pages offering to download SKA, so I think it would not be unreasonable to make the assumption that it takes currently about 2000-3000 new players to increase the patron count by 1.
I believe this highlights that it's time to consider increasing the value of subbing to my patreon, and adding the 2 week delay seems like a fairly non-intrusive way to achieve this. Most games have a internal -> public delay of 1 month, which I would prefer to avoid to keep the feedback loop fast. However, there may be a point in the future where further raising the delay time might become necessary.

Increase exposure. For niche games like SKA, exposure is key. On itch I plan to add the option to buy access to the internal release only. By having a paid version alongside the free version I obtain the option  to participate in sales. It may sound strange that you need to put a price tag on something to gain exposure, but welp.
In the future, I would like to offer patrons, whose lifetime contribution exceeds the price tag, to get a key to the internal release on itch. The same applies for a future steam release (if that works out).

Just to be on the safe side: This change has no impact on the actual development plan and for patrons there are no changes.