Kobold Adventure 3.00 (coming soon™) (Patreon)

Howdy, everyone. I'm terribly sorry for the long radio silence, but I have some big news in store for you. Before you get your hopes up: no. 3.00 isn't here just yet. But it's growing closer and closer with every passing day. Before we get into what it'll bring, let's first go over what happened to cause this extended period of no updates.

The later half of February and pretty much all of March were a god-awful time for me due to several pieces of litigation combining together to properly screw me over. Short synopsis: I run a sole proprietorship in order to receive money from Patreon. Being a business owner, all of my business expenses need to be noted down in a ledger for inspection purposes, preferably with receipts.

Sole proprietorships are special in that there is no distinction between my personal funds, and the funds of my company. All expenses are counted as business expenses, because I am the business. Hence, I had to spend a long-ass time noting down every single last burger I spent money on in the past three years. Without receipts, I had to write it all down manually. Accounting hell.

So, that was pretty much a month and a half down the drain. What did I do the rest of the time since my last Patreon post? Well, my thought process was as follows: instead of coming back way too late with little to show for, why not take a bit of extra time and advance Kobold Adventure to the next level? That's exactly what I did.

Kobold Adventure started out as version 0.01, a simple and short proof of concept hastily thrown together somewhere in late 2015; merely toying with the programmatical side of things to see how viable it was to create a well-presented branching storyline in plain HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. Life, sadly, tore me away from the project, and it went into hibernation for a year or two.

Long-term corporate employment wasn't really cut out for me. My circadian rhythm doesn't quite match up with a twenty-four hour day-night cycle, so I have a hard time adhering to rigid sleep schedules. Nine-to-five might as well have been midnight to morning as far as my brain was concerned. In general, work was absolutely crushing what little soul and inspiration I had left. I was pouring my entire being into a meaningless void of cold, thankless profits. Rising numbers noted down in reports, read by nobody. I was killing my own creativity, and well on my way to becoming another plaque on a door for the remainder of my life.

But then, about halfway through 2017, I finally grew the balls needed to quit my comfy, secure job in favour of pursuing a more creative way to make a living. Some soul-searching and much-needed revitalization later, I dug up that old proof of concept I made. In September of that year, I reworked pretty much all of the code that made it tick, while maintaining the pretty fancy UI that I had spent oh-so-much time making a few years earlier. To call it 1.00 would have been disingenuous, since it wasn't quite a continuation of what 0.01 was. So, I dubbed this renewed passion project: Kobold Adventure 2.00

As you all know, I've stuck with the game ever since. I've developed it from a tiny 50 000 word project with nothing but the Forest and Home scenes; to a massive monster of a choose your own adventure story with a rough estimate of 900 000 words spread over twenty-six scenes with more variations and details and intricately woven between-the-lines overarching themes than even I myself can remember, not to mention the 200+ pieces of artwork involved.

Kobold Adventure 3.00 is a natural evolution of the game. A next step, from passion project to full-blown franchise. It involves a proper desktop version, that you can play without needing to open up a rickety terminal window running a local webserver. It'll have an Android app, currently in active testing, so you can play the game offline on your phone. And, best of all? I'm currently in the process of getting the game on Steam.

We're not going to the moon, baby. We're reaching for the fucking stars. It took me a while to get to this point, and it damn sure is taking a bit to make the leap from 2.xx to 3.00, but I feel like it's one hundred per cent fully worth it. I think it's about time to take the game to a whole new stratosphere of possibilities. Can you feel it? The gathering potential? Because I sure can, and I intend on fully utilizing every single last bit of it.

I do apologize that this development required some time, and I'm sorry that I haven't been very active in sending out Patreon messages or responding to Twitter direct messages, but I assure you that everything I do, every breath I take, every creative ounce I spend, is fully directed at realizing my dream, and yours: making this shit blow up so I can get art and audio and maybe even some animations for every single last bloody scene that I write and then some. Maybe I'll even get a co-author or two to work on even more content simultaneously.

It all depends on how successful this evolutionary leap will be. Don't get me wrong -- I'm not banking on making millions overnight. If the Steam release ends up not really working out, then so be it. We'll still have the brand new standalone desktop version and the Android app, which by themselves I feel like more than justify the time I've spent working on them. Things'll go on as usual, and I'm sure the project will garner further interest gradually over time. Nothing lost but a bit of precious time.

But if is successful? I've got some pretty big plans. For now, let's not start daydreaming just yet. Let's stick to the reality of things. The Steam release will essentially just be a paid version of the standalone desktop client at first. I'm not sure how difficult these features will be to implement, but over time I plan on adding a whole shebang of exclusive functionality to that version of the game. Steam achievements. Trading cards. A tiered badge. Emojis. Maybe even an animated chat sticker, although I don't yet know what the restrictions are on those. We'll see.

And that, if you choose to buy the game on Steam, is what you'll be paying for. To support development, and to gain access to these extra features that will be lacking from the base game. For clarity: the Steam game will not receive exclusive updates. Content will remain on par -- or even perhaps slightly lagging behind -- the online version. The free desktop client and the Android app, similarly, will be kept as up-to-date as I can without spending each month uploading a gigabyte of builds.

A long time ago, I promised that the latest version of Kobold Adventure would always remain free to play. To this very day, I am sticking to that promise. I will not be paywalling or timegating any content. What you see is what you get, regardless of whether you bought the game on Steam, or if you contributed to its development on Patreon, or if you did neither of those things.

Of course, I appreciate everyone who helped make my dream a reality. I couldn't do this stuff without you guys. But I remain steadfast and stalwart in my conviction that everyone should be able to enjoy the hard-wrought fruits of my tireless labour.

Sure, I develop Kobold Adventure to make a living. That's a cold, hard fact. But I also spill my creative guts in an effort to at least hopefully entertain someone somewhere out there. And that is why I always want to keep the latest version of Kobold Adventure free to play. So that everyone, no matter who you are or how much money you have, can enjoy it to its full extent. And with a little bit of luck, and a little bit of hope? Maybe my writing can leave a mark on you -- or on the world -- for better, or for worse.

Anyway, I've poured out too much of my heart already for a single Patreon post. It's been a long time coming, really. Kobold Adventure 3.00 will hopefully release somewhere next month. I'm not sure when exactly yet. I may do a 2.99 update before then, to test some other new features and systems that I've bundled in with this software upgrade.

Tomorrow, I'll try to pick up the slack when it comes to Patreon intro messages, and I'll also try to respond to the messages I've received on Twitter and on here. Thank you all for your patience, and I sincerely hope from the bottom of my heart that we're about to rocket in to a whole new era of Kobold Adventure. Thank you for your continued interest in the game, and for believing in me, in us, in the project as a whole. I'll see you guys when it's time to shine. But the star? It's not me. It's you. All of you. You are the stars, brightening up my sky. Thank you, and I hope your faith in me will prove to be well placed.

See you soon, space kobolds.