Patreon
Your favorite cybersloths at Cardboard Computer have started a Patreon, and we're inviting you to join us there as we share more of our development process (spoiler-free), and eventually start to explore what's next for Cardboard Computer. We have some fun stuff planned for this Patreon. Our idea is to experiment with the form & do weird, small-scale stuff without taking up too much of our development time.
A few early plans/ideas:
- Articles about our process and influences.
- Spoiler-free development and process-related video streams.
- Phone calls from Ben.
- Sharing tools we've built -- Blender extensions, reusable source code, etc.
- One-off short stories, formal experiments, and nano-vignettes.
https://www.patreon.com/cardboardcomputer
Read on for some of our thinking around this new experiment ...
First, we just want to thank you for your support, in whatever form that's taken -- making fan art, sharing our work with others, or simply buying a copy of Kentucky Route Zero at some point in the last several years. Being able to work on this project and share it with you has changed our lives, and I'm not crying -- you're crying!
We started Cardboard Computer -- and Kentucky Route Zero -- with no idea of how big this project would grow, and no experience in planning something at this scale. You may remember that early on we experimented with different pricing structures before settling on selling the game as a whole for $25 & distributing the "interludes" for free. That approach has been a modest success, financially. We've managed to retain our independence and keep our heads above water -- if only barely, sometimes.
This approach has its own challenges, though. Most game studios wouldn't charge the same price for a game that took months to develop as one that took years -- but we don't have any way to respond to those differences in scale or complexity between acts of KRZ.
Another thing the one-price-fits-all approach doesn't take into account is the audience's varying levels of commitment and resources. For example, this tweet we recently got in response to those t-shirts our BFFs at Annapurna Interactive printed up:
So, again, we really appreciate your support in any form that has taken or might take, and we don't expect everyone to feel like this person. But if you do feel like this person, we want to meet you there. Hence, Patreon!
There's another dimension of this experiment -- we want to learn how to work in a more open way. With Kentucky Route Zero, we've mostly been pretty quiet, working in obscurity and then "suddenly" releasing updates. That's definitely suited the tone of the project, and it's one effective way to preserve the mysteries of each act until you can encounter them whole. And nobody's ever busted us for changing a puddle during development (the perfect crime). But as Kentucky Route Zero wraps up (excuse me while I breathe into this paper bag for a minute), we're thinking a lot about the kinds of projects we want to work on next. While we know our next project will still rest on this crucial sense of mystery, we also know we want to be more in communication with our audience earlier and more often in the process. So another goal for us with this Patreon is to learn how to do those two things at once. We hope you'll join us for that experiment.
https://www.patreon.com/cardboardcomputer
xoxo
jake+tamas+ben
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