Patreon Updates (Patreon)

Hello everyone!

I've come back today with some news and ideas regarding the Patreon refresh! This is something we've been wanting to do for awhile - get some new graphics and clean the tiers up at the same time.

We're not taking anything away. In fact, we want to add more to our Patreon to reward you guys more for supporting us.

Here's a look at our current ideas:

So, what's changed?

As always, all rewards are included in the tiers above them, too.

We've removed the $50 and $70 tiers. We still have some people on these tiers, and we can't thank you enough for all you've done to support us! But we'd rather tighten up our tiers to give a better experience for everyone. At the moment, there's a lot of bloat - it makes more sense to condense down into something more managable.

The $30 tier now includes the advanced notice of merch, a permanent 15% off code for our store, and a new reward - credit in all of our games as "Game Designer". Previously we offered "Producer", which will soon lock to those currently on the $70 tier.

People on the $25 tier may now request artworks to add to the monthly poll, down from $50. We absolutely LOVE being able to get your requests illustrated, so moving this down to include more people was very important to us. We note that we have many more people on the $25 tier than the $50 tier, though. We'll trial the request system for a couple of months to see how it works, then workshop from there if we need to make any changes to accomodate the increase in requests.

You'll notice three new things on the $15 tier. Firstly, we plan to start up an 18+ ONLY art poll. This will be separate from the others, and only available to people on this tier. We want to be able to include additional exclusive illustrations, and we also wanted to include more 18+ illustrations, so this is the way we've decided to do that. We'll vote on either a single person or a two person artwork every month, probably without a theme, then leave it up to the artist to design it as they wish.

Next, the beta build has moved to the $15 tier. It began at a higher tier to keep it fair to those that supported us on the beta tier on Kickstarter. As you know, compared to Kickstarter, you have to pay each month a new beta comes out on Patreon. This ends up a little expensive, so we think it's fair to move it down to include more people. We believe this will be a positive move! In the future, we may have more than one game up for beta at a time.

Lastly for the $15 tier, you'll notice another thing that's brand new... Patreon Exclusive DLC! Although we haven't worked out all the fine details, it's become immensely clear through our survey that people want more side stories and DLC. What exactly we'll make is up for decision still, but we hope to bring out additional content that features both the main and side characters from The Divine Speaker (and possibly other games in the future). Our first thoughts would be holiday "episodes". Halloween or Christmas, anyone?

From here, we have one additional item on the $10 tier. This is character Q&As, which was suggested through our survey. We've done a few of these in the past, but the time and costs associated with them made them a lot more effort than they were worth. However, we intend to keep these a little more casual, and occassionally have a question or two illustrated.

There's one new idea we have on the far right - a free monthly wrap up post. This will just vaguely go over what we've posted for that month on Patreon, with links to view everything and some thoughts about what we'll post in the next month.

The last change is converting the $3/$7 tiers to $5/$10. We've been thinking about this for awhile, as the tiers don't really match up with the later prices.

Goals

We hit our last Patreon goal quite some time ago, didn't we? Based on survey results, we have some ideas about where we want to go into the future - those namely being short stories and webcomic sidestories. We're not certain on these yet, and a lot of research is so be had especially on webcomics, but they're both definitely things we're interested in doing.

Everything you've read here is subject to change, but we're very happy with what we've workshopped and came up with. You'll notice we don't have any tier names yet - this is something we're a little stuck on! We want them to move away from being TDS centric as in the future, we hope to move on to further and different games. Think of it as future-proofing our Patreon!

These changes won't take affect in the immediate future, since we'd need to get graphics done as well, but we'll let you know when it's set in stone to begin.

That's all from me for now - if you have any queries or ideas, don't hesitate to send me a message or comment below. We read everything!

Gabby