Getting rid of stretch goals (Patreon)

After thinking through this carefully, we've come to the conclusion that we're unhappy with how we've approached stretch goals. We wrote earlier that we were making stretch goals meant for you rather than for us, and we thought that'd be a good thing. But as it turns out, we don't think they're good for anyone - not for you nor for us.

To be honest, it always kind of bugged us that we'd be holding features back until X amount of money was raised, and for several reasons. First of all, it feels a bit unfair to our users. A stretch goal is something that's not reached by a single user alone, but by a lot of users. So if a user wants a specific stretch goal, there's really not much he or she can do about it to reach it, and that might be quite frustrating. Especially if that stretch goal is far away. Generally it just feels weird to have collective rewards in the form of features.

Another thing about them is that there are logical errors. For example, if a stretch goal is reached and its feature implemented, does that mean the feature should be revoked if the stretch goal is no longer reached in the future? That would be quite odd indeed.

There are also negative consequences in our own development due to these stretch goals. When working with something like this, it's absolutely crucial that your own will is somewhat aligned with what you're doing for things to have any quality in the end. What that means is, for example, if we feel like working on feature X, but feature Y was just reached as a stretch goal, we'd be reluctant to work on feature Y but forced to nonetheless. That's a perfect way to kill positive creative energy and burn yourself out.

Furthermore, by the time a stretch goal is reached, the state of affairs might have changed completely. Perhaps another feature would be a lot more pressing to implement, so it wouldn't make any sense to be spending time on the stretch goal.

The reasons we're bringing this up is because we want to spend time working on a character editor, but with all these stretch goals being reached, we'd have to divert time to these other tasks instead. And that's hurting us because we really don't feel like working on those right now. And quite frankly, we think most people would much rather want to see a character editor than for example fisting. The only thing these stretch goals are doing is putting shackles on us while at the same time keeping you from getting features that perhaps are of bigger importance than the current stretch goals.

They're also keeping us quite stressed, because there are important changes that we need to do, but that we keep pushing in favor of these stretch goals. Changes like refactoring how characters are set up to make it a lot more maintainable in the long run, or giving the snapshot system some love and so on.

So what are we going to do about this?

We're ditching stretch goals. We might add some in the future, but we don't want stretch goals to be bound to features (unless there are good reasons for doing so). We don't want to hold features back for our users, and we don't want to be shackled ourselves in our own development. So until further notice, stretch goals are ditched.

Rather than stretch goals, we want the pledge rewards to be the items that bring value to our product. That makes a lot more sense for everyone. If you want something, you can pledge to receive it. And if we're successful in attracting people to support us through pledges, we will be able to continue working on this and keep implementing new features.

What about current stretch goals?

Sex toys are still something we want to implement, but fisting is put on ice until further notice. Erection slider and dynamic hands are far more likely to be implemented sooner.

Mac version is something we still want to see, but creating builds has been a pain in Unity 5.1.3 (the version we're using). Due to bugs in later releases, we haven't been able to upgrade lately. But for Yiffalicious version 0.5, we want to upgrade Unity to 5.3.x, which hopefully fixes the building. Furthermore, OpenGL 4 is implemented in 5.3, so things that were previously Windows-only such as tessellation might now work on mac as well. These are things we'll have to investigate. We don't know when a potential Mac version will be available, but upgrading to 5.3 should hopefully increase the chances.

So what's the plan now?

After the public 0.4.x release of Yiffalicious, we'll start upgrading to a later version of Unity, and upgrade all the libs we're using. Once that is done, we want to automate more of the character setup process, so changes that are applied will be propagated to all characters automatically. Right now that's not the case for a lot of things.

After this is done, we want to upgrade the way the cloud connection works, because right now some users seem to have issues connecting to the cloud.

In the meantime Dogson will be working on the new characters, as well as experiment with generic character archetypes used for the future character editor.

Toys, erection slider and character editor will happen after this.

Unhappy?

If you feel somehow cheated by these changes, please let us know and we'll give you a refund.

tl;dr:

We're ditching stretch goals. They're not helpful for you or for us. Right now we want to focus on structuring our project in a way that's good in the long term, and start experimenting with a character editor. Sex toys will still be implemented, but fisting is put on hold.