Hello SubscribeStar

Hello everyone,

As many of you probably already know, yesterday I sent out a message to the people who used to support me on Patreon, with some information about this new page of mine here on SubscribeStar. It contained some general information about the reward tiers and my schedule moving forwards, and I thought that it would be a good idea to also post the relevant information in a post on here, so that's what the majority of this post will be.

I haven't publicly announced this SubscribeStar on my blog or on the Discord just yet, as I am waiting until after v0.3.2 is released. Sorry about last week's delay, and v0.3.2 should be ready for this Friday.

New tiers

As you've no doubt noticed by now, I've reworked the Patreon's old 1/3/6/12 tiers to a new 1/5/10 system. I've put almost all of the rewards that were in the old 3/6/12 tiers into the new $5 tier, with the exceptions of 'second vote in polls' and 'name in credits' being in the $10 tier. Some more information regarding these changes:

1. I wanted to make some new titles for SubscribeStar tiers in order to distinguish them from the old system on Patreon, so they're "Human/Half-demon/Demon" instead of "Common/Rare/Epic/Legendary".
2. The way the fees are calculated on SubscribeStar seems to hit lower tier rewards harder than on Patreon, due to a flat amount of $0.30 + 5% processing fee, plus 5-7% SubscribeStar fee, so while $3 on Patreon didn't suffer too much from processing fees as a total percentage, I felt as though it was a little too much on SubscribeStar. For tiers of $5 and over, the fees balance out and are very similar to Patreon's, so I thought I'd change it to that. (With Patreon's new fee model, SubscribeStar will actually work out to be better than them at this level.) The $1 tier is hit quite hard by the flat fee rate, but I still wanted to keep it available as a sort of 'tip' tier.
3. To compensate for the increase from $3 to $5, I've put the 'vote in polls' and 'early access to commissioned artwork/other content' rewards into this tier.
4. SubscribeStar's management screens currently look to be a little more cumbersome to cycle through than Patreon's (as it seems to lack any way to organise subscribers, or display more than 13 names on a page at once). Due to this, I fear that it would be too time consuming to keep 'name in credits' rewards going for everyone in both the $5 and $10 tiers, so I've limited it to just the $10 tier. (It was taking upwards of 4 hours to sort out each month's credits on Patreon, which wasn't too bad, but it would take considerably longer for the same amount of work on SubscribeStar.)

Release schedule

Apart from these tier changes, everything else concerning my release cycle will remain unchanged. I'll continue to push all releases (both preview and public ones) to github at the time of their release, and will continue with the alternating public/preview/etc. pattern:

• Week 1: Public release, available for everyone at the same time.
• Week 2: Preview release, which will be posted here for the $5 and $10 tiers.
• Week 3: Start over at week 1.

I'm calling each release a 'week' as I will be aiming to have each release out in a window of 7-10 days. Things do often run over, but I will do my best to keep within that time frame.

Please remember that as I push my code to github for both public and preview releases, anyone can manually compile the game from the code at any time. I build and post the game for everyone at the same time for public releases, but for preview releases, I will only post it for the $5 and $10 tiers on here.

Thanks

Thank you so much for your support! If you have any suggestions or feedback regarding the new tiers, the release schedule, or anything else, please leave me a comment!