Sunday Update 05/24/2020 - Massive changes to credits

This week I was going to finish the puppet animation after experimenting with some ECS programming, however it was interrupted by Patreon finally dropping tools related to sales tax. I'll be making the next update a Friday update, because Sunday update's suck and I'm also not happy that there has been two sequential updates without any new front end content so I want to make the next one as soon as possible.

If you haven't read the last post, governments around the world are going to start collecting sales tax from Patreon. Patreon has done what it can to give creators the tools and information to reduce the taxable amount as much as legally possible. While researching and setting up these tools I discovered a technique I could use to further reduce the taxable amount of most (90%) of Patrons' pledges.

Effective immediately all tiers will have access to submitting credits. Credits/donations are the categories that Patreon has said are exempt in "the vast majority of states". Adding them to the tiers decreases the taxable value of the rewards in those tiers. For example Cloth tier was previously receiving 5 rewards between voting, beta builds, supporting development, development logs, and discord access. 5 rewards for $5 = $1 per reward, adding a tax exempt reward without increasing the price means 6 rewards for $5 or $0.83 per reward. Therefore, by adding credits to the cloth tier I can reduce the tax liability of those rewards by 17%.

In order for this to work the credits can also no longer be permanent since "one off" rewards can't contribute their value every month. In addition to that, with the way I'm calculating rewards, higher tiers must have some extra benefit otherwise credits would be valued at $0.83 at all tier levels instead of increasing in value with the tiers. Patron tiers will have color coded text (tan for cloth, brown for leather, grey for metal, and for old patrons: light blue for arcane and bright orange for divine). Credits can also appear in up to 3 places depending on your tier:  Metal+ tier will be on the splash screen as usual, leather+ will appear at a marquee on the title screen, and cloth+ will appear in the Credits menu under "Patrons". The previous credits have been moved to the Credits menu where cloth+ appears. Patrons won't need to resubmit their credit every month, if you launch the game and log in with an active pledge it will reactivate your name in the credits.

To speed things up credits will no longer need manual approval, they should appear the next time you restart your game. Fair warning though: egregious misuse of the credits system can result in a ban from my Patreon without a refund. Swear words or sexual innuendo are 100% fine,  slurs, advertisements, disparaging remarks, or using someone else's real first and last name will get you banned. I don't expect it to be a problem since it should be exclusively adults here, but if someone acts like a child I will treat them like one.