Project and Patreon Status Update.

Hello! It sure has been a minute since anything has been said here, hasn’t it? Let me take a moment to get this patreon channel up to date, address what happened in 2020, and what is planned for 2021

In 2020, the Alpha playtest launched and was a huge HUGE success. The community rapidly grew and with that came more developers. Since the launch of the alpha, the number of contributors to the github increased by 5 times!

These extra hands and your patronage throughout the year have catapulted unitystation ahead of schedule. From the beginning of the playtest to now, the game has transformed from a shuttlebomb fest into a substantial, tangible game where entire rounds can be played and enjoyed with a variety of functioning roles, antagonists, and activities to get involved with.

But our largest milestone, launching the game on Steam, is still ahead of us. I’d like to affirm that our goal to release to Steam by the end of this year is still looking promising. As of this latest update and with health 1.0 looming on the horizon, we are nearly finished with our 0.5 goals, which just leaves us with 0.6 to go before hitting Steam.

Let’s also address the change in management. I’m Jack, The new Unitystation patreon manager. What happened to Doobly? Don’t worry, We didn’t kill him; This isn’t a coup. He’s still around.

A couple months ago, Doobly decided he wanted to focus less on the management side of Unitystation and more on the development side. He very kindly trusted the responsibility of the Patreon to me. I've been running the patreon and ledger for a few months now.

“How will you handle the patreon differently? Will it receive a higher frequency of progress updates than when Doobly was in charge?” --

Let me acknowledge that there are a few different kinds of patrons here:

There are the patrons who are very active community members that hang out in the discord and play the game regularly. You guys like to keep your fingers on the pulse of development.

There are the patrons who engage occasionally on the discord and check the game out periodically, mostly around when we ping for staging tests or when particular community servers go live.

And finally there are the patrons who very rarely pop into the discord, generally don’t follow any of the feeds, and play the alpha only when the Developer Updates videos release or perhaps have never played the alpha ever.

First, I want to say we love you all. This game would not be possible without your contributions. You’re all champs.

I want to engage with you patrons more often than Doobly did previously, but I know there’s a large crowd that doesn't want to be spammed by updates too often.

So, the compromise is: if you want to know more about what is happening with Unitystation, the best move would be to join the discord channel → https://discord.gg/hNX4Pz68

As a Suspected Changeling or higher tier sub, if you connect your discord and patreon account, you will get access to the #vip-lounge, which is a place for you patrons to ask questions directly to me and the other heads of staff.

The largest change I am making to the patreon is a new patron voting system. It is my opinion that you, the patrons, should have some decision-making power on what we focus on in development. So, we are going to experiment with a poll that we will run in the #vip-lounge that will allow you all to have input on our decisions from month to month. Each Suspected Changeling will get a single vote, with Centcom Officials having their vote counted twice.

In addition, we are looking at hosting Q&As occasionally in the discord where all community members can ask questions relevant to the project and we will answer them live. As patrons, you will get advanced notice of when the Q&As will go live and you will be able to ask your questions in the #vip-lounge, where we will make sure to answer them. We already hosted a pilot Q&A and it went smashingly well, I think.

These are just prototype ideas; we will try them and adjust based on feedback as it comes through. We will host the first patron bounty poll later this week, so stay tuned. And, of course, if you don’t care about that stuff, then sit tight. I won’t rock the boat here too much.

( if you haven't seen it, watch the latest developer update here → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JR0Ah4L40g )