Monthly Archives: June 2018

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What’s the best Patreon reward?

It’s exclusive game content or backer builds, obviously! But apart from that:

Which patreon rewards would you be most interested in?

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Easy Mode

A quick way to get a look at new content. All tomes and locations unlocked by default, reduced in-game prices, and if you fail to recruit a minion, you can undo your last turn.

Hard Mode

A retune for roguelike replayability. More intense invasions, and a bad ending scene if you lose. Designed to be shorter and much tougher.

Cheat Menu

Just go hog wild: insta-recruit minions, give your self more mana, complete minion transformations immediately, etc.

Backer Discord

I hear people like these? I’m probably not going to turn voice on for you though, no offense. 🙂

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My Biggest Regret With Fleshcult 1

My biggest regret is that Fleshcult is a server based game. You click a button, it sends a request to the server, and all the processing happens there in Python code.

There are several disadvantages:

  • It doesn’t run offline. If the server goes down, nobody can play.
  • There’s no easy way to keep multiple versions of the game live. I was always careful to keep saved games backward compatible because I know players can’t just fire up an older version, so my ability to make drastic changes was limited.
  • Modding is completely impossible.
  • I haven’t been able to do a totally unrestrained promotional push, because I know the server can only take so much before it lags out horribly or starts spitting errors. Server administration isn’t my forte.

This is all my own stupid fault.

Web browsers can’t run Python without some kind of translation layer, so fixing this is daunting. I’ve been looking for Python to Javascript translation tools and I’ve finally found something that looks doable but it still requires 3 months of work. This isn’t exactly good for Patreon momentum.

The Plan

Here’s how I’d do it gradually, instead making everybody eat all their veggies before dessert:

  • Add content to the server version for a couple of months, all the while doing prep and fixing up code that translates poorly.
  • Fork the code into a server version and a Javascript version. I’d split my time between programming the Javascript version and writing text for the server version. Text is easy to merge when I need to bring the Javascript version up to date with all the latest stuff.
  • Announce a final push and spend a month 100% focused on programming the Javascript version.
  • After making it public and doing a bunch of bugfixes, call that initial Javascript version “Fleshcult Classic” and archive it off.
  • Start work on Fleshcult 2 from the same codebase. Then can I start making really big changes.

What do you guys think? Technical details below the fold.

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