I hope my suggestion winds up being helpful. On a related note, even though I'm kind of shooting myself in the foot by saying this, you might get more mileage out of the work you've already done by, instead of posting the LATEST version TOMORROW, postponing it to 2-4 weeks from now, and posting an older update in the meantime. Don't get me wrong, speaking as a FAN, I'll happily snatch up the biggest version of the game you're willing to put out there, but as an OBSERVER, I could see doling it out over a few weeks giving you some advantages:
1. For people that have never seen it, your game bubbles to the top of the Updates page twice, instead of once. Dozens of games get updated or added every day, and threads can get buried pretty fast, so if you can get double the exposure for the same amount of work, it might be useful.
2. For people that noticed the game the first time, it shows that the project is more than just a proof-of-concept, and ongoing work is being put into it. I've been burned on so many Patreons and KickStarters that crap out immediately after launch, that almost as a rule, I wait until I've seen a game get 2-3 updates before I consider pledging money. I've heard many others say they do the same, no matter how good a demo may look. The only reason I bent my rule here was because you earned some credibility with me for engaging with us pirates on day 1, and because 5 patrons after 3 days seemed criminally low.
3. It gives people an idea of how much progress they could expect to see from update to update, and the length of time between them. You put out a changelog for v0.199, and it sounds substantially bigger than v0.1, but there were like 6 betas between then and now, and even with what I can glean from Patreon updates, it's hard to tell what was added between them, and to what extent. There was a sense of where you wanted to end up, but not necessarily where we were at the moment, or how far we had moved from the previous month.
I don't know, just a couple thoughts. I've never run a Patreon, so it's not like I'm speaking from experience or anything. Sorry for the wall of text. Regardless of how you do it, thanks for deciding to put up a new version for everyone.
1. For people that have never seen it, your game bubbles to the top of the Updates page twice, instead of once. Dozens of games get updated or added every day, and threads can get buried pretty fast, so if you can get double the exposure for the same amount of work, it might be useful.
2. For people that noticed the game the first time, it shows that the project is more than just a proof-of-concept, and ongoing work is being put into it. I've been burned on so many Patreons and KickStarters that crap out immediately after launch, that almost as a rule, I wait until I've seen a game get 2-3 updates before I consider pledging money. I've heard many others say they do the same, no matter how good a demo may look. The only reason I bent my rule here was because you earned some credibility with me for engaging with us pirates on day 1, and because 5 patrons after 3 days seemed criminally low.
3. It gives people an idea of how much progress they could expect to see from update to update, and the length of time between them. You put out a changelog for v0.199, and it sounds substantially bigger than v0.1, but there were like 6 betas between then and now, and even with what I can glean from Patreon updates, it's hard to tell what was added between them, and to what extent. There was a sense of where you wanted to end up, but not necessarily where we were at the moment, or how far we had moved from the previous month.
I don't know, just a couple thoughts. I've never run a Patreon, so it's not like I'm speaking from experience or anything. Sorry for the wall of text. Regardless of how you do it, thanks for deciding to put up a new version for everyone.
