Patreon Weekly #29 - Dec 20th, 2019
Added 2019-12-20 23:01:15 +0000 UTCHey patrons!
For this weekly I'm doing things a little differently. Progress on 0.8.0 is still going nicely, and I'll have some stuff to share about that next week, but for the moment I want to talk about future patreon rewards. Thanks to all of your support, we're now within striking distance of the $200/mo milestone, so let me share what I'm considering adding for future milestones! This weekly is public, so anyone can view and comment on it. Please feel free to give feedback on these potential rewards, or to offer your own suggestions!
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Firstly, I would really like to give some casual livestreaming a try, and I think there's an easy opportunity to tie that to the patreon! Here's my current thought process on how this would work:
- Streams would happen on Twitch.tv at least once a week, and will run for 4+ hours. I'll be using a mic but won't have a webcam, at least to start out.
- Everyone is welcome to watch, but $2+ patrons will be able to vote on the stream topic. I'd like to start by offering patrons a choice of what game I would play, but once I've got the hang of it programming or Q&A streams would be possible options as well.
- If Q&A streams ever do happen, patrons would be able to submit questions ahead of the stream which I will answer first.
- $10+ patrons will also get a VIP badge in chat! (as long as VIP slots are available, twitch doesn't give streamers an infinite supply of these)
Note that I don't intend for streaming to be a major focus of the content I produce, it's just another way for me to interact with patrons, with the added bonus of taking the place of time I would normally spend playing games or programming anyway.
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I'm also aware there's a significant demand for physical rewards. Unfortunately, many of these items have significant production costs, and so offering them as a direct reward to patrons isn't really feasible (especially when we're just at $200/mo). One option then is to offer merch discounts to patrons, but that requires that I'm selling merch regularly first, and also it also feels really scummy if the only physical rewards require patrons to spend additional money. I do want to look into potentially selling regular merch sometime in the future, and if that happens offering discounts to patrons becomes a lot easier, but for now I think this is too far off to commit to.
However, there are some things which have lower production costs, such as pins, stickers, and postcard-sized prints. It is much more feasible for me to offer these rewards exclusively to patrons for free! I think these might work really well as a sort of loyalty reward. Something like sending patrons an exclusive postcard/pin once they have been subscribed for 6/12 months. I really like this because it rewards loyalty separately from raw amount donated. I think it's good to be able to make long-time patrons feel appreciated even if the amount they give per month is at the lower end.
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Lastly, there's some opportunity to expand or improve the existing rewards as well!
- For patreon content polls, I feel like the current 'one or more per-update' is a bit wishy-washy. It might be nice to have content polls at a consistent time once per month instead.
- I think patreon weeklies are doing very well atm, but they can sometimes feel a bit too focused on what I'm working on in the moment. It might be nice to do something like a once a month post which gives some slightly longer term plans and a broader outlook. This might work nicely as a $5 or $10 tier reward to complement the regular weeklies.
- I also feel like I should try cutting down on the wordiness of patreon weeklies, but that's on me and wouldn't be related to additional rewards.
- Once the discord becomes established there's lots of opportunities to expand on that as well. Things like voice chat, gaming events, etc. This is a bit less specific as we'll need the discord to come into existence first.
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So, with all of that said, I'd love to hear your feedback! I'd be happy to hear what you think about the above ideas (especially if there are any physical rewards you might like to see in particular), and if you have any suggestions on top of these!
Comments
Hey Scott, More regular merch should happen at some point, possibly coinciding with a more wide release of Shattered on other platforms. Some amount of pixel art definitely will be included, but I'd like to try and offer better designs if people are paying money for them. While it's a bit of a moon-shot, I'd love to offer merch of a similar quality to what you'd get from a place like fangamer. Pixel art works really well for smaller things like pins and stickers though, and those have the added benefit of being cheaper to make and ship, which means I can offer them to patrons for free, instead of at a discounted rate.
Shattered Pixel
2020-02-13 20:23:04 +0000 UTCRegarding merch: I'd love simple iconic stuff like character sprites on coffee cups and vinyl stickers. That should be pretty easy to do through a print-on-demand merch website. I'd definitely go in for more complicated stuff (I'd love the hunter/warden standing in a field of untrampled grass!) too but that'd take a little more design time. Really quick ideas: Warden sprite ♥ rotfruit seed sprite sprites of the rogue's cloak and assassin's blade the tengu on one side of a mug and a player sprite surrounded by bombs on the other the goo pumping with the huge cloud around it You could also run time-limited meta cheese merch for a month or two, that'd probably be pretty popular. I'd be willing to bet the community would be happy to make a whole bunch of designs like this and release rights to support development.
Scott Bruce
2020-02-11 19:52:33 +0000 UTCUnfortunately ingame rewards are quite tricky because of Google's policies regarding payment. If I were to offer basically any ingame benefit on the Google Play version that was paid for via patreon then Google would remove Shattered from Google Play. That being said though I do want to expand the ingame supporter system at some point, and some form of better visual customization is very likely there.
Shattered Pixel
2019-12-21 17:26:48 +0000 UTCYeah definitely, but a lot of the most iconic assets are either from vanilla or heavily based on vanilla sprites. Either way though I would want to involve Watabou at least a bit in any serious attempt to merchandise Shattered just because he is responsible for it existing.
Shattered Pixel
2019-12-21 17:24:40 +0000 UTCPinsets of your original art for various things (exotics, potions, etc) wouldn't be treading on Watabou.
Alexander Simanovsky
2019-12-21 07:51:56 +0000 UTCI personally am not that interested in physical merch, but if there really is a big demand for it then starting with pins/small items is smart. But I think merch will be a smarter idea once Shattered Pixel Dungeon has a bigger following and the Discord could be helpful for that. I imagine it would be much easier to add customization options in game. Idk how comfortable you are with pixel art, but that might be the more widely appreciated rewards.
KylePop39
2019-12-21 03:33:47 +0000 UTCYeah I would be integrating the discord with patreon so that roles are automatically assigned based on patron tiers. The main reason I mention wordy blogs is that I don't want to burn people out on reading them, and often I could say the same information in a more concise way if I spent a bit more time editing. This is especially a concern as I'm probably going to keep making more posts as more milestones are reached.
Shattered Pixel
2019-12-21 02:45:59 +0000 UTCA pin for the Shattered logo also sounds like an obvious choice to me, assuming there aren't any issues creating a pin with the logo's somewhat irregular shape. Pixel art in general seems like a great candidate for enamel pins, but for art assets that are in vanilla I would want to involve Watabou at least somewhat, as the art for those is his work.
Shattered Pixel
2019-12-21 02:45:05 +0000 UTCCertain pins I would like to see that would be distinctive of shattered pixel dungeon in particular would be pins of Shattered Pixel avatar icon, or pins of Shattered Pixel Dungeon (the chest). Rat King pins would be good too, but imo they are less representative of support for you in particular.
Zrp200
2019-12-21 00:08:04 +0000 UTCI really like all of these ideas! I do want to mention that I've heard that Patreon has a Discord bot, which does support linking donation tiers to roles. While I don't know how it works, that's probably something worth looking into once we hit $200/mo. Also, personally, I don't mind wordy blogs, but it's up to you how you want to do those.
Lassoloc
2019-12-20 23:19:09 +0000 UTC
