I'm thinking of doing 'continuous builds' (I usually do daily builds at work, so.. every day I work on LoM, when I'm done, I push another build to Mega). I wouldn't want those *out*, because obviously there'll be half-built quests and more bugs than an ant-colony, but for some people it might be interesting.
I'm trying to not do staggered releases (especially the "tier A, tier B, tier C patreons, then normies); there's a couple of reasons for that, but the big one is that it feels dishonest. Most of the players know about pirate sites like F95, so for them the fiction that "since you're only a $5 patreon, you'll have to wait another week" is just a polite fiction... you'll go grab it from one of the 5 mirrors in this thread. For *some* users, who don't know, it'll actually be a wait (and they'd be justifiably pissed when they find out I'm fully aware of the pirates).
But mostly it's about the difference between monetizing pleasure and monetizing pain. This comes back to my unfortunate stint in Free-To-Play mobile games. When you generate revenue by 'pinching' the player, you're monetizing pain. Think of the "Wait 24 hrs to progress through these 3 gates, or give me money" mechanic in Candy Crush. Nobody *asked* for that. Nobody said to themselves.. thank god, I've got another mandatory cool-down period before I can play this game again. Meanwhile, Heartstone monetizes pleasure... here's a special offer to get lots of packs that we'll animate really pretty when they open. Yay you got an awesome card!
Making porn games is my hobby, and my escape from normie development... I won't do anything that monetizes pain in them
I actually do a lot of these, just as part of my work. In terms of what would make sense for patreons, I think access to all these kinds of how-I-work videos would be one thing. I probably should start narrating them, but I'm kinda paranoid about my voice being recognized
Here's one I worked on for Act II, showing work-in-progress animation for one of the Homework assignments ("Giving and taking pleasure is at the heart of Ceremonial Magic....")
I also thought about releasing the various asset sets to patreons; maybe a high tier would be "here, all the raw 2D assets" (I can't release the 3D assets, since they're not mine, but things like spine files, raw renders, etc might be interesting. I even considered source code access, but I doubt anyone wants it
Yeah. That kind of thing is both easy and nice. They also make nice patreon-only posts.
Yeah, I've got no intention of letting anyone change the story or break canon with this. It's more stuff like random encounters in elsewhere, slice of life moments, etc. No, you don't get to impregnate Molly, there's reasons why she is a virgin, and she shall remain that way (at least vaginally) for a while.
Likely a good suggestion. I like the idea of collecting questions over time and then doing a bigger AMA
Yeah, I've been scouting through a bunch of the patreons from people i respect. My biggest headache is how to differentiate higher tiers without getting evil. Obviously stuff like "work with me to create a random Elsewhere event each month" works, but I don't know if I should put that at the $10 tier or if that's going to destroy me
Anyways, thanks for the feedback, it more or less maps to what I've been thinking myself.