itch.io

Yep, so I never wanted this project to actually cost to play. I want it to be free for several reasons -- the most obviously being that financial status shouldn't prevent someone from playing if there was a positive message in the story. Game development today just seems so greedy to me and i wanted to showcase that you can successfully build a project just based on donations. But, the costs of operation can be expensive. So I started the Patreon page to accept donations for those who want to support the project. Those who donate basically get early access to the update when it's finished. The Patreon supporters also end up being early testers for the project and give me more sets of eyes before i release to the full public. Patreon donations also get more behind the scenes stuff and supplemental content when I get a chance to do it. But the public free version is the same version as the Patreon supporters see, I just drop it later to give me time to fix issues or bugs.

Here on Itch.io you can always download for free but while  there's a donation spot here, Itch.io doesn't really give me much flexibility for supplemental stuff, extras, there's massive upload restrictions, and the UI is a mess to deal with. so i use Patreon as my hub and everything else is just used for free distribution versions. It's too much for me to juggle multiple websites and multiple devlogs-- that ends up negatively affecting the game development because i'm just handling websites all the time.