Kyzrati is on Patreon

Well here we are, after eight years of roguelike development and blogging, it’s time to try a little something new: I’ve set up a Patreon page!

I’d use my real name but most people aren’t as familiar with it :P

If you’ve never heard of it before, Patreon is basically a subscription service through which you can support individual creators and their work.

A number of developers have relied on ongoing donations (or specifically Patreon) over the years to help support their projects, and I’ve always thought this kind of model would be more suitable for the way I do things--less focused on the end-game commercial value of something and more about just making cool stuff :D

Even $1/month can really add up, but I guess we’ll have to find out together how feasible this is over the long term. You can always change your subscription amount (note that Cogmind in-game rewards are permanent even if you do so--you only need to get those once). And while there are benefits, it’s not really about the benefits. I’ll get to that below, but first, a little recap for those who may not know me so well:

Background

I’ve been making roguelikes since 2011, and full time since 2013. You can hear a bit about my past in this talk I gave in 2016. Over the years I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words on roguelike development here on this blog (and some other blogs), plus a sizeable collection of crowdsourced FAQs. I’ve helped build and moderate the largest group of roguelike developers in the world, r/roguelikedev, and I do lots of work to promote the genre and help other developers. I also built REXPaint, a user-friendly ASCII/ANSI editor popular among devs and artists.

My largest project is Cogmind, on which I’ve already invested over 10,000 hours and still update regularly. It’s a sci-fi roguelike that’s been innovating on the genre for years as a polished immersive experience in a living world with compelling lore, deep mechanics, an accessible quality interface, and plenty of audiovisual goodness.

Who would’ve thought flashy ASCII would be a thing?

My work has been recognized in Rock, Paper, Shotgun, PC Gamer, Destructoid, Strategy Gamer, multiple gaming magazines, and according to RSS aggregator Feedspot, my blog is one of the internet’s top 50 development blogs. A number of my crossposted articles have featured on the front page of Gamasutra as well. Actually, if you’re interested in roguelike development (or maybe you don’t know you’re interested but will be soon ;)) check out my primer available in both text form and a video of the talk I gave at the 2018 Roguelike Celebration in San Francisco.

Why Contribute?

There are perks listed in the tiers, but it’s not really about those incentives. The best part is that I’ll be able to keep doing what I do, with less pressure to focus purely on commercial endeavors and more freedom to share helpful and creative roguelike content. Eventually with enough support this could even include additional side projects that wouldn’t be financially viable on their own, but that I’m sure fans of my work would enjoy.

Specific to Cogmind, releases like Beta 8 are a great throwback to the alpha days where we’d get significant chunks of new content added to the world, but without DLC (which I want to avoid) it’s not sustainable in the long term to continue this line of development when most of the niche core audience has already purchased the game and revenue starts to dry up. By this point a smart developer would have already moved on to their next project, but I see so many more ideas that would be right at home in Cogmind and it’d be nice to unlock that extra potential. This is one reason I’ve decided to try transitioning to a new supporter-based model, or (more realistically) at least a hybrid model. I may have released a commercial game, but after years of updates above and beyond what were “necessary,” I’ve clearly never operated like a normal business :P

I have other goals as well, including more 7DRLs (have you seen POLYBOT-7? :D), an even more powerful REXPaint 2.0, probably a Cogmind sequel, and hopefully one day reviving X@COM.

And of course I’ll continue writing, too! I have so many more topics to cover, and this blog will continue as it always has, albeit assuming there’s demand for it we’ll be getting even more articles ;)

So if you have the means and would like to support my work with the roguelike genre and community, I am grateful for any amount you can provide. I appreciate everyone’s support over the years, and couldn’t have done it without you all :D