This is going to be a weird blog post. I want to get straight to the point: I opened a Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/winterwolves where I’m going to post some juicy stuff/previews, including unreleased art, or talk about the games not yet officially announced. I am also going to post in the blog every two weeks from now on.

But…why?

I know you might think I opened a Patron to get some money. That’s for sure, but it’s not just about the money, it’s also about time.

The most precious thing we have is time, and making a blog post like this one, or image previews like my famous “romance sneak peek” or “romance graph” and so on, takes time. You need to open the various sprite images, scale down, cut the portrait, put them in the grid, add a text, nice effects etc etc. One hour is gone and you don’t even notice it!

Then, there’s also other things. Maintenance for example: unfortunately running your own site needs attention. I need to update the blog/forum software, do backups, approve posts, etc. Another issue are images that gets deleted after a while. A while ago I posted all Loren 2 “camp talk” images in forums, but the original hosting places deleted the images, so now they’re not available anymore (I’ve reposted them all already in the Patreon).

What I’m trying to say is that by using Patreon to post such things, I’ll eliminate a lot of problems and issues that keep me busy, and at the end of the month they add up! Imagine even only an hour a day – that’s 30h a month “wasted” doing other things, while I could have used them to do game development instead (that’s what most people are interested in).

Lastly: lack of ideas. I don’t know how many other developers have a blog/diary where they regularly post every week. Recently I was struggling to find ideas, find something to talk about. I asked writers to make the characters introductions for future games, to help fill some blog posts. But many times I had to stop and think for hours about what to write!

In summary, I think we can all agree that it’s better if I could save all those hours I usually spend on admin/maintenance and thinking about what to write in the blog, and instead work on the games, right? 🙂

If you can’t afford to pledge, don’t worry!

Of course I’m aware that not everyone has the money or is simply not willing to support me on Patreon: so it’s perfectly normal to just keep buying my games (which is the most important thing). The Patreon page is for those “super fans” who want/can support me even more, and in exchange get to know firsthand about the new stuff or see exclusive content.

But the games themselves will remain the same as before, I’ll put the same efforts in making them, no matter if you’re a patron or not 🙂