Patreon Weekly #38 - Feb 25th, 2020

Hey Patrons!

Last week was extremely busy for me with various family commitments, and I'm still a bit exhausted from it, which is why this weekly has been so delayed. I was able to get the concepting for the Yog fight in place though. This week I'm going to start on more specific design and implementation, with the goal is getting a new Yog fight mostly working indev by the end of this week.

I'm also planning on making some improvements to the Patreon soon! This includes adding and shuffling around some milestones, allowing everyone to vote in polls (though higher tiers will get more voting power), and getting a community discord going! Expect to see these improvements in the next few weeks.

Read on if you'd like more details...

Design Work on Yog Dzewa

Firstly, Yog's map will be similar to the current one, but with a bit more terrain and a new centerpiece. Yog itself will be in the center of the arena, while the entrance will be moved elsewhere. You can see a WIP picture of the centerpiece below. The centerpiece also lets me bring back bits of the old demon halls tileset from way back in v0.2.1. The more dirty or fleshy look of the ground suits Yog well.

As for the gameplay of the fight, I'm keeping the eye, fists, and larva, but the pacing of the fight is changing significantly. Yog now summons fists one at a time as it becomes damaged, and is invincible while any fists are alive. This makes the pacing of the fight much more consistent, instead of having it be mostly decided right at the start.

As there's only one fist at a time, I have much more room to make them individually powerful and interesting. The old rotting and burning fists will get some changes, but I'd like to add new ones as well. I might do something like having 3 fists per fight, but more than 3 types of fist in total. This gives some nice variability to the final fight, and should be fairly quick to implement. This is also very easy to expand on, so if time is tight I can settle for 3 fist types now and add a couple more later.

Finally, I want the eye itself to be a bit less passive. Rather than spawning larva when it takes damage, the eye will instead have a small set of abilities, one of which is larva spawning. This lets the eye participate in the fight a bit while the player is dealing with a fist. Increasing the eye's activity as it becomes injured is also a nice way to make the fight more tense towards the end, even if the fists are fully random.

Patreon Refresh

The Patreon has been on a steady course for the last while, but has begun to stall a bit around $165/mo. I think that makes this a perfect time to freshen a few things up!

The milestone jump from $100/mo to $200/mo is a bit steep, so I'm planning to restructure milestone amounts to try and make their pacing a bit smoother. Giving more value up-front will also encourage people to sign up even without an approaching milestone. I'm also planning on committing to livestreaming and physical loyalty rewards, as mentioned in Weekly #29. Expect both of those to show up in the $250-$500 range.

Because of that milestone shifting, the patreon discord will be moved to $150/mo, which means we've already unlocked it! I've already started setting it up behind the scenes, and will likely start inviting a few folks to join it a bit early before rolling it out to all patrons with the refresh. 

Lastly, I'm also going to adjust the content polls slightly. They'll be moved to 'once a month', rather than 'at least once an update', which should help make things a bit more consistent. I also plan to open up voting to all patrons, but higher tier patrons will get more voting power. I'm currently considering giving $2/$5/$10 patrons 1x/3x/7x voting power. This encourages everyone to participate, but still gives the strongest decision-making power to the higher tiers.

Naturally, as any Patreon changes directly affect you guys, I'm happy to hear any feedback you might have!