The Patreon Bandits

Hello everyone, 

Still pluggin' away at Chapter 1. I'll give you all a detailed update Monday, as I should have some time to work both Sunday and Monday. In the meantime, I wanted to touch base on two topics. 

First, on Patreon rewards. Meet the Zalran bandits (or at least 95% of them). I need to add a bit more to the bandit on the right, but these three misfits are the results of the first $20 Patron drawing I performed in January. They are quite the bunch, let me tell you. Anyways, I wanted to let everyone know the status of Patron rewards and future drawings. I know that I have not emailed my $50 Patrons to discuss potential ideas, or performed any Patron drawings since January. Don't worry, I have not forgotten about you all, and will pick this up once I release Chapter 1. There is still plenty of game to develop, and I will be performing a number of drawings for Chapter 2. 

To reiterate, the way this works is if you are a $20 or $50 patron, your name is entered in a pot. During development when I create NPCs, locations, or monsters, I will conduct a drawing from the pot. If your name is drawn, I will email you and have you create the NPC, location, or monster. You can only be drawn once per game (unless we cycle through the whole pool). When the game is completed, I will reset the pot for future games. So, for those three misfits above, I randomly selected three Patrons and they described their bandit and his personality. Hopefully, they are happy with how they turned out :-). 

Second, I want to briefly discuss the current delay on Chapter 1. Mainly, I want to alleviate any fears that future chapters will drag on like this chapter is dragging on. As you all know, I've been working on chapter one for quite a while now. The brunt of that time has been spent learning the ropes, so to speak. To give you an example, I spent over 10 days in March learning how RPG Maker's battle formulas worked (Hit rates, evasion, item drops, etc.), how experience curves worked, and how encounters were handled. Yet, this last week, I put the battle stuff on hold for a bit to get back to moving the chapter forward. Since last Friday, I've completed portraits for the 3 bandits, 3 event CGs, written and edited 2 main quests and 3 side quests, and created 2 maps. My point is, once I get chapter 1 done, and have all this system stuff working, I believe things will progress quite nicely. I've said it before, I can write and draw MUCH faster than I handle the scripting and system components. 

In the end, I know it is frustrating to have to wait, but I want to deliver a quality product to you all. I still believe a late summer release of the entire game is feasible, and that remains my goal--note, this is not a release date, but my personal goal. My ultimate goal is to get enough funding to work full time and produce about 2 games per year, which would equate to around 10 pledges a year. 

Anyways, time to sleep. I get to draw a sexy scene tomorrow... so, pleasant dreams for me! :-)