I’ve been publicizing my new Patreon to friends and family who I know will want to support it. It’s kind of like mooching off everyone I know who works harder or earns more money than I do, so I can make this weird passion project a more central focus of my life.

I’m always managing my energy against a day job, so I put minimal effort into the Patreon page at first, planning to start by canvassing the folks who will donate no matter how janky it looks, then iterate on it later to try to appeal to a wider patron base. Who exactly is the demographic for this very personal visual novel/web series?? I have some guesses but really no concrete idea yet.

So I’m still thinking through what the patron tiers should be. For now, I want to make sure people who can only afford 1USD/month, can still access full episodes, because there’s only one episode and the production value isn’t top-notch yet. But over the last couple weeks while begging my family members for money, I realized that without a trailer, I’d be asking total strangers to pledge a dollar a month for the project sight unseen!

So this morning I re-edited the cold open of episode 1 together, and I’m releasing that as the first trailer. Currently, even though the “show” is scripted and rendered by a game engine, I have to manually record the “game” running, then use OpenShot video editor to cut down long and awkward pauses in the dialogue that come from part of the code being optimized poorly–I plan to write a technical devlog about the voice-over/dialogue system soon.

OpenShot

A bunch of people have pledged at $10, which I didn’t actually make a tier for. With people valuing my work higher than I expected, I’ve started coming up with ideas for a $10 tier reward. One idea which might appeal to fans, and also help make the project better, is that $10 patrons would be invited to the virtual table-reads of episode scripts, and have the chance to give feedback while the show is being written.