January 2026 Newsletter (Patreon)

Happy new year, to clinic patients and fellow doctors alike.

I've spent most of December living out of boxes due to landlord shenanigans, and dealing with a wave of silly bollocks (™️) relating to moving house. But now we're settled in our new rental and I can start thinking more seriously about video production and streaming again.

I'd like to extend my gratitude to everyone who has helped the channel grow in 2025, either through the Patreon or simply by sharing and discussing the videos and other content. It's all extremely helpful and heartening to know that people love what we do here and want to see more of it! Financially speaking, the first quarter of '26 is probably going to have myself and family in "just about surviving" mode, but if IGC keeps growing at its current rate that shouldn't be a concern anymore by the end of the year.

This newsletter will outline a few tweaks to the structure of Patreon, and give you a reminder of what to expect from IGC in the first chunk of 2026.

IGC's Content Schedule for Early 2026

• There will still be public streams every week; if you're reading this newsletter as a free tier subscriber, you can send your games in via the usual form.

• The Community Supporter stream will continue to take place every other Wednesday. Paid members can access this via the Playtesting-and-QA channel on Discord. If you're a member, please don't use the form in the first bullet-point as this will place you in the loooong Indies Under the Knife queue. Use the special Discord-only form instead. These may increase in frequency as things develop. Some games may get longer standalone streams or review videos based on how much I think there is to dig into in them.

• The video production schedule is still around 3-4 weeks. Over the last few months the process of "draft a book chapter, make it into a video, post the script as bonus content on Patreon" seems to have worked quite well, and many of you who are paid members have commented that you find this useful.

• I will probably continue to do some streams around my own games, although if this starts to become more than 50% of the channel's streaming output (due to the demands of the project) I may consider giving it its own channels to avoid confusing people with what IGC is about; which is meant to be predominantly feedback workshops and then video essays related to relevant topics. If that ends up being the case, there'll either be a second channel for KRANKENHAUS (the studio name we are using for DirtWorld) or simply for DirtWorld itself.

And... this will probably need to stay a bit vague for now, but this year I would like to experiment more with content which features other 'experts' in different subfields; level designers, UI experts and so on... to try and do similar stuff to what we've being doing since the start, but a little bit less "Dr Joe focused". I don't really know what this will look like until I start doing it, but it's not going be a podcast where every episode is about how so-and-so sold a million copies and now ✨you can too✨.

New Patreon Tiers - To Be Confirmed

Toward the end of January I'll be doing a small shift around in which benefits are unlocked by each Patreon tier. So far I've treated the mid-level tiers mainly as a way for people to pay more if they want to, but it feels a little unfair to not try to offer a few bonuses to these tiers. So from the end of the month we'll transition to something like the below... which is basically a rearrangement of everything you already get through the Patreon.

Our Discord is, in my mind, the most valuable perk of being a paid IGC member, and nothing is going to change about Discord access, but the other perks like watching the videos early on here or getting text-based essays will become something for the blue and purple tiers.

This is something I'm having to do to ensure we attract new patronage in the coming year, which will in turn help me continue to run the streams and make videos to a sustainably high standard.

🟢 tier gets Discord access and all the benefits which go with that (e.g. the fortnightly playtesting streams and a place to get regular game design help and feedback online).

🔵 tier gets all of the above, plus access to the Ad Free early versions of video essays.

🟣 tier gets all of the above, plus all of the text-based behind-the-scenes stuff e.g. scripts, slides, notes and so on. This can vary a bit depending on the month (for example sometimes the books for Game Developers Library do have notes and sometimes they don't) but this tier's rewards are much more geared around getting more educational material. At the same time, most of this is still stuff produced as a byproduct of the process of creating content for IGC.

🟠 tier is still for private 1:1 Mentoring, and I'll be opening one or two more spaces as and when I'm able to. I'm also going to be raising the cost per month of this tier by £10 to help cover costs on my end (the 1:1 is meant to be an hour of my focused time per month but it often ends up being more, so the price needed to increase if I'm going to be able to offer more slots in a sustainable way).

Basically, every tier will give you access to the community and a place in the review/feedback streams. Orange tier is a set of limited spaces for 1:1 coaching/mentoring. Purple tier is more like a study subscription where you get additional reading material, and Blue tier and above give you the YouTube video essays earlier.

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Thanks for reading, and I hope you all have a great start to the year!

Joe