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Discord, Patreon, MARDEK

5 years ago918 words

I've been looking into setting up a Discord server, and dusting off my old Patreon account, finally, in preparation for MARDEK's Steam release tomorrow!

I feel... reluctant about Discord, to put it mildly. I watched a video about how to set up a server, my response to which was "blech" because I felt like it's meant for the sorts of people I'm not (social gamers), and because I was reminded of all the community drama from the Fig Hunter days that I've absolutely no desire to repeat... It's exhausting enough actually building games; I don't want to have to deal with random troll tantrums all the time.

Perhaps things are different from the Flash days though. Maybe now that my games aren't free for whichever of the unwashed masses dimly stumble into them, now that there's a bit of a barrier to entry, it might put some of the worst ones off. I can but hope.

I've set up the server, but that's all. If any of you from here who have commented enough for me to recognise you are interested in being among the first to test it out, let me know somehow, like in an email or something. I can't promise I'll say yes to all of you right away since this is a stupid time to be doing this with MARDEK's release coming tomorrow (I've been procrastinating, like with an assignment that has a due date), but we'll need to start somewhere!

I've also revisited ∞ my Patreon page ∞, which I've talked about doing for ages but which I've not actually, you know, done. I didn't even look at it, because I was so worried I'd disappointed people by not working on Taming Dreams (which is what it was set up for) that it'd be full of angry comments about how deceptive or useless I was, and... well, things like that are tough to face. Someone a while back talked of 'toxic comments' being on there, which reinforced the fear.

I don't know what they were talking about though (maybe I misinterpreted), because I didn't see anything bad on the page at all! A huge relief. I was very surprised to see that 24 wonderful people were supporting me on there - for a total of $101 per month - despite essentially hiding the page away out of shame for years. I greatly appreciate that!!
The description was set up around Taming Dreams, though, and the tiers were only applicable to the Alora Fane community site I ran years ago. I've changed both the description and the tiers, though I still consider it a work in progress (I also need to make a proper banner image thing...), and I'm very open to suggestions. I know we've talked about this a few times now, just days ago, but it all felt abstract then, whereas now I've actually made at least some decisions about tier rewards so it's easier to edit that than come up with everything afresh. I should look over old comments to remind myself of what people said.

Usefully, when editing a tier, Patreon offers a list of standard reward types which creators typically offer, so narrowing the potential choices like that has been useful. I'm not sure what to do about the $6 tier though; currently it's set to just having your name included in my games' credits, but game releases are such an infrequent thing that it doesn't feel like a worthy perk to me.

One option is to limit Discord only to people who support this tier or greater. This would definitely assuage my biggest fears about running a community again, and I'd actually like being able to talk with a small group of deeply interested people like I do with comments on this blog... But I also feel that a more open Discord community might be necessary for the kind of growth I'd (annoyingly) need to make it as an indie dev in the long term.

So I don't know, there are still decisions to be made. But at least I'm doing something, after avoiding these things for so long! Obviously it's going to be a slow process, rather than doing everything at once. I suppose having the MARDEK release deadline helped though.

I still haven't posted on Reddit (due to procrastination more than fear), but I'll try to do that tomorrow, once MARDEK's actually buyable. I'll also upload the trailer to YouTube, where it might get a few hundred views and maybe a couple of conversions if I'm lucky.

The current wishlist count is 490. And I'm anxious. I want MARDEK to have life beyond Flash, though I also enjoy just creating in my little bubble, and I'm worried that bubble might burst and let all kinds of distractions in. Perhaps not; perhaps I'll just be 'disappointed' by how flaccid the response to MARDEK will be, and next week it'll just be back to the usual.

Will it beat Sindrel Song's whopping... 117 sales, at least?!? Who knows!!

I'll release MARDEK shortly after I wake up tomorrow, so it'll be around 8-9am GMT, which might be the early hours of the morning in the USA, maybe? Something like that! Timezones!

I also want to reply to some of the comments on the Divine Dreams post(s), though all this other stuff has got in the way. I'll likely also start a new game of MARDEK myself tomorrow, and I'll hope none of us experience any issues!