Pushed out more updates for the Unreal version in September, slowly bringing it up to par to the Unity one. It's been going much slower than hoped. But at least multiplayer is working fairly decently now and I get more confident with it every time.
There has been one new builder this month Skelly and last month I was so busy, that I totally forgot to mention OV_104_Atlantis as builder and producer.
There won't be new producers for the time being as I started a ko-fi and didn't make tiers there and might remove them also from Patreon completely. One reason for this is also because I want to have everyone mentioned in-game equally next to each other, which makes it easier to set up when putting it on some wall or so.
Total contributions this month were about $200. I won't do separate listings per platform anymore though as it is not very exact anyway with the different currencies and how and when it's converted and transferred to PayPal, Payoneer or now Stripe as well.
There was no payout in September. There are still no real investments apart from a few small Patreon subscriptions.
Thank you very much for all the contributions! :)
Now let's look back at the second year:
- The tank farm has been properly integrated and thus could be used by Zack in his videos, which created a huge wave of contributions. Special thanks go out to Zack and crew here! :)
- It was followed by the transport (SPMTs) and build site update.
- The latter already showed problems with floating point precision in Unity, so I started to investigate other game engines.
- Created the Unigine demo in about a month
- Created the Unreal Engine demo in a bit more than a month
- Moved on with Unreal and pushed several bigger and smaller updates
- Unreal version now has part of build site with Megabay crane, SPMTs, basic Mechazilla for stacking of basic booster and ship
- and everything with multiplayer!
- Started a Patreon
- Started a ko-fi page as alternative to Patreon as I was not super happy with it
In numbers:
- hit 1000 followers on Twitter @StarbaseSim
- got 20 active Patrons (38 total), €127 per month
- and my first coffees on ko-fi :D
The following Itch numbers are totals (so including the first year):
- views: 26.7k
- downloads: 8.7k
- payments: 81
- gross revenue: $754
Almost 7x as much downloads and payments compared to last year with the proportion staying the same at almost one payment per 100 downloads. However, the Itch numbers are only partially comparable as there is Patreon now as well and for the last half year there were only updates on Patreon. If we get another 7x or maybe 10x even in the coming year, especially on Patreon, it would become actually sustainable. Let's hope I can survive until then! :D
Because after two years of full time game development, I'm finally broke now. As this was foreseeable, I already applied for so called "Bürgergeld" in May. It's a form of social welfare in Germany that is supposed to provide the basic means of living, supposedly without too much hassle and part of it you can also get on top of a small income. This seemed quite attractive at that point as it would allow to continue to focus full time on StarbaseSim - compared to doing part time stuff or taking on a credit and worrying about paying it back. On the other hand, I was also a little bit curious actually how the whole process works, because you hear lots of (horror) stories about it. So why not get some first hand experience? As it turns out, the wheels of bureaucracy grind very slowly...as expected. What I didn't expect was, that it is such a big hassle to provide all the documentation in the correct way. So there is still no money in sight from that direction after shuffling documents for more than 4 month. Maybe I have to do some part time stuff after all.
I'm wondering how much more payments would there have been, if it wouldn't have been free to download. The 8k number includes also patches though, so in the end it's far less unique people, who downloaded it. So maybe just a couple of 100 people would have paid upfront? But I want to get it into as many hands as possible. So there will always be a free version. It might just be a bit older or without certain features like multiplayer. We will see, how it goes with the Epic Games Store version that will come sooner or later.
Else, the plan for next year is the same as before, follow the development of the real Starbase and Starship program, and maybe even jump ahead a little bit...like Moon or Mars base?