Hi @everyone ! As you all may be aware Vecter for the past week has been featured on the Free to Play Hub on Steam. This is, of course, AMAZING news but it came with a price, a very real one. Last months hosting bill was £62.05 which is a more than insignificant amount of money. If that were a one-off it wouldn't be a problem however the forecast for next month's bill is... grim to say the least

I don't want to compromise current or future features just because of some random bill, Vecter barely got off the ground! More on how to fix this in a minute but there's one more thing: There's a lot of you!

This is, of course, a good thing! A lot of new members have joined the discord server and keeping me and the Ro..o's on their toes. You all have great ideas, some of which have already been implemented in the game, while a lot are sitting in the backlog... and that's the problem.

I'm just one dude and I can't implement all of the great suggestions submitted by the community. A lot of them even contradict each other, for example having a colour picker to select your own game colour scheme and having dynamic colours that change during the game. Both interesting ideas, but can't really have both so we need to pick one and I don't want to be the one to make that decision.

Given the above, I'm trying to fix two birds with one bazooka. I present to you the Vecter Patreon page https://www.patreon.com/vecter

The idea is as follows: the funds received through Patreon will go towards server maintenance, going to gaming conventions, buying new tools for development (arcade machine ain't going to build itself) and coffee for the developer (I like coffee). In exchange one of the Patreon tiers gets access to a special portal where they vote on what features get developed next. The most upvoted feature gets picked up by me to work on and, once finished, I move on to the next one.

This will be an interesting experiment, as it takes the direction of the game partially out of my hands and into yours, the player-base. We've seen plenty of examples where developers were so disconnected from their players that the end game was undesirable, let's see what happens when we give the players a bit more control. It's feedback-driven development at its finest.

There are only two patreon tiers right now: The Server Admin and The Architect. The server admin gets to see patreon-exclusive content and helps with the server cost. It’s a very small tier if you just want to make sure that your high-score is visible for years to come (because, you know, server costs).

The Architects are the ones that actually get to vote on which features get made. They also have the power to submit their own feature requests directly to the portal and not rely on the feedback / features channels to get picked up.

Each tier also has their own discord role should they choose to join our lovely little chat community.

Of course, the feedback, features and bugs channels will function the same as they have before. Bugs take priority over everything else and feedback and features get picked up and dropped into the new voting portal to be voted on by the architects and assigned a position in the development queue.

Let's see how this plays out shall we?

P.S. the voting portal that the Architects have access to looks a little something like this: