1900 Patrons! (Patreon)

It's been a while since I made this kind of post as ever since the 1.0 release of SKA the number of joins and cancellations have been huge. However, starting with the 1.1.0 major update of SKA and the 0.1.0 release of Liora, we have gone back to growing pretty fast again.

It would have probably been more symbolic to make this post at 2000 Patrons but we have recently reached an important financial goal, which is why I wanted to kind of recap the financial situation a bit in this post and then talk about that newly reached goal.

First of all, before I go into that, thanks everyone for supporting and allowing me to continue game development even after the release of Star Knightess Aura's 1.0 version, I hope I can make even better games in the future.

So, first I would like to briefly talk about my current general plan. Ever since the Steam release, we had an extra source of income stream which I planned to used as follows:

• (1) Personal Goal: Save up the first 100k (50k after taxes) and put those into an ETF as savings for when I get old or huge emergencies the internet deciding to ban adult games. <- I expect to finish this goal with the steam payout at the end of this month.

• (2) Incorporate and become AuraGamedev GmbH: I'm currently a single person company which has certain benefits like making accounting easier, but other demerits like it being more difficult to full time hire someone. I think I crossed various tresholds this year that will force me to do corporate accountaing anyways in the future, so I'm losing the main advantage as a single person company anyways. The downside is I need to put 25k€ down as company capital plus in Germany this whole process is insanely complicated so accountants and lawyers want their share... Currently the income on steam and itch is about 5k together so I assume this phase will last about ~6 months.
  I think the process is worth it since it will only become more complicated the more IPs I need to transfer from my single person company to GmbH. And once it's done I can---

• (3) Offer our Assistant Developer Trihan full time employment: Raw dev power is one of the most limiting factors for content production and "high quality features" (Like adding animation support in future games) - the other being art production speed. While the latter is difficult to tackle, the former is something I can improve by offering Trihan a full time position. It's not 100% clear yet if it will work, as am in Germany and he is in the UK and a certain event 10 years ago has made such a constellation more complicated... But we will give it a try. The reason I list it here is because our Steam / itch.io income revenue stream would be used to primarily fund this.

Then, coming back to Patreon. We had a huge surge of new people over the past months. Sadly, this looks a bit better than it is; there is one event we need to talk about first however: Ever since the delisting of SKA on itch.io due to the Collective Shout incident, sales there have collapsed by like >75%, going down from 4k per month to 1k. On the other hand, our Patreon has grown by roughly 4k since then, so in more positive other words:

• Despite losing a major stream of traffic and income source we haven't lost any funding

• We are still up enough to reach new goals.

This new Patreon money has up to this point mostly been used to improve the funding of our current freelancers. Those who maybe followed the changes of the Goal post have already seen them; I will summarize the recent changes here:

• The art budget has gone up from 1k per artist to 1.3k per artist.

• Trihan's budget went up from 800 to 1700, so he's no longer chronically underpaid.

• We added a minor budget for composing soundtracks at 300 per month

We look back at my roadmap post from the start of the year, there are two money features that I originally wanted to fund via the itch.io revenue stream but with that one drying up, I decided to move into our goals:

• Experimenting with Voice Acting (Not necessarily full voice acting! x_X And perhaps it won't work out) but at least the goal is to gain experience working with a voice actor and integrating her assets into the game.

• Translation support - we have already done a lot of work on the technical side here by working on community translation support for SKA. The next step here would be to hire someone to translate the current version of LIora into chinese with the hope of building up a larger fanbase in that language and then kickstarting an SKA community translation into chinese through that. I mention chinese specifically because the player base there seems be about twice as large as from any other country (including english speaking countries) and it's one of the most requested features. Also, hiring translators to translate SKA is currently out of scope. I estimate a cost of 100k+ per language --- in other words our current toal steam release, so that seems like it would be too risky as an investment, which is why I want to pursue the route of community translations for SKA.

And this finally brings me back to the latest goal that we reached: Subsituting the itch.io funds, we will be using a 300/month budget to expand our General Assets spending, starting with the first voice acting experiment soon(tm hopefully I find the time to organise it). And then on the next goal that I scheduled, assuming we keep growing, I would then expand it again but this time mostly focusing on pushing translations for Liora. I noted them as General Assets budget rather than making it its own category because at the moment I have no idea how the distribution in spending between these two would really be like.

On a final note, a very common requested feature is animations. Usually, I would categorically say no, it is out of scope for our current projects. BUT our Patreon has been doing so well, and I don't want to raise false hopes here so please don't take this as a promise, I'm just extrapolating the growth, that it could theoretically be possible to have this feature for Liora.

As mentioned above, we didn't have that much net growth due to the loss of the itch.io revenue (and perhaps the growth of patreon is just a side effect of a shift of traffict from itch.io to Patreon), but now that there isn't that much to lose and we keep growing, then we could have the necessary budget. By my current research, a competent animator for the number of CGs we are producing would probably end up at around 1k per month, then I would probably also need an additional assistant developer OR finish the business development to hire Trihan, and probably we would also need another art budget increase for Deniis due to extra workload of prepping the images, and then there is more stuff to consider since we have dynamic costumes and yada yada yada, but overall it doesn't sound impossible.

But okay, the last part here is maybe me dreaming and I shouldn't assume too much for the future based on the past. :'D For now, I should focus my mind on the present and figure out how voice actor recruiment works.

Anyways, that's the current state of where we are. I hope the read was interesting to know where we stand and where we are heading.

Also I noticed just now I forgot currency units everywhere, that's € for everything x_X