Yeah, that'll be the basic gist of the levels; your objective/macguffin for each level will be different (getting the 6 pieces of the celodst emperor's crown, getting all the vines blocking the way to a Fragment chopped down, etc.), but the functionality will be the same.
Yeah, and even the Patreon builds are standalone levels; this is because with each new level, we're also introducing new global gameplay mechanics.
For example, by the time we moved on from the Ice Level, we also introduced Powerups, the new Hub Map system, a Mini-map, and so on. When we moved on from the Electric Level, we introduced the Megamap, dynamic music/lighting, the cutscene editor/system, and many other features. And now, already in the Earth Level, we've introduced the new "fixed" powerup locations, multiple tilesets, enemy health bars, and so on.
The problem though is that in doing this, the previous levels would need to be updated with these mechanics, and they will, eventually; however, we're leaving this for until the end of the game, once we've functionally gotten a good chunk of all 5 levels done.
Then, we'll be able to sweep back in one shot and add all these mechanics to all the previous levels as we flesh out the previous levels with cutscenes and features that they didn't have due to their previously outdated state; if we updated all the levels as we added mechanics and tweaked them, that would be a lot of compatibility testing for every single tweak which would turn into a massive time drain to do so.
Doing it this way allows us to get the game out faster, for the updates to be consistent, and for the updating of the engine to be consistent as well without many bugs on the first sweep, vs. leaving a trail of bugs everywhere.
You can get the game demos on many of the sites on the front page, and come release, we'll have it on many, many sites to sell, but Patreon will be the cheapest purchase price (at around $10) while the other sites will be $15-$20 to deal with the loss in profits we'd take from the publisher's cut of sales.
The demos after the Public Electric Demo aren't getting released publicly, they're for Patrons only, but of course, I'm not about to DMCA anyone pirating them as I talked about a page or two ago.
(That said, Patreon actually is a massive savior to adult game devs; prior to them, the feasibility of actually making an adult western game was practically impossible unless you wanted to take an extremely long time to finance it yourself with your day job, and even now most sites take a minimum of 30% of profits and that's if you're lucky, with DLSite taking a minimum of 40% and upwards of 70%.
Patreon only takes 10%.
Additionally, Patreon gives multiple warnings to creators to try and help them out to abide by the credit card company's guidelines (Patreon themselves has to abide by the credit card companies, they themselves have said they allow adult illustrated content as long as it falls within the credit card companies guidelines, which they, nor any other business on the planet can fight, as the credit card companies have an extremely tight iron grip on everything that uses money in any way (besides crypto currencies, of course)).
Any other company whatsoever in Patreon's line of work tbh would have just wiped all adult game devs off the site to avoid all risk and rake in investors for SFW content, and they definitely wouldn't be giving multiple chances to the devs to fix their stuff to stay on the site, and their rate of income they take from us is literally the lowest out of ANY site online.
So if anything, we should be thanking Patreon for sticking it out like this for us when they have no obligation to do so.)
