On crowdfunding games, donations & Gotham Knights

Over the years, I've had quite a few messages from people offering to buy me game X so that I could fix it. Most of the time I declined, as I had no idea what the code would look like without seeing it, and I wouldn't want to run into a major roadblock that would put me off fixing anything for good after countless hours of exhausting code reading, experimenting, calculating and all the rest that I do.

I also know that I would never want to just take something and offer nothing in return, even if the person had told me that they don't mind and that they see it as a gift. Everybody says this, and I'm sure they mean it, but I also recognize the actual reason they asked remains that they hope I deliver. It's a lot of pressure.

Sometimes I have access to a demo for a game on a known engine, or even access to a game without owning it, and then after a look at the code, I can say I am likely to deliver, so I'm not as opposed to the offers under those circumstances.

Gotham Knights is somewhere in between, as it's on a known engine but there is no demo or anything concrete to go by. At the same time, I see all the requests for a fix and no documented progress made by the community.

The good news is that buymeacoffee has a new feature called Wishlist, which allows me to crowdfund to at least distribute the efforts between multiple people, as opposed to having one person have to cover the whole cost. I'm reluctantly giving it a try today, with $5 already contributed at the time of this writing. I don't think I want to promote it to get anyone's hopes up in advance though.

Since we are talking funding, some of you may be wondering about the role of the contributions you already make every month. They are still a tremendous help and I recently welcomed new patrons, which is also highly appreciated, as I say in the private messages.

I don't know whether I would be as active if it weren't for you, nor would it offer me any sense of stability if this were to go away. The donations and continued support of this community remain my only sources of income, but I can only hope for a day when they cover the minimal costs of living and consistently purchasing new games for widescreen solutions.

Update: Someone on Steam suggested that using the UE4 console unlocker may help with Gotham Knights, so I made note of this on WSGF. If the solution is viable enough and introduces no FOV reduction, I will just issue refunds to the two contributors so far.