Diaspora - Updated 12 February 2024 [First Draft Complete!]

IMO Patreon is a great tool for people that create content, and a way for supporters to help them out. That being said, I’m going through a rough patch as of now. Thanks to the awesome choices my government has made in the past three years, a US dollar is equivalent to 40 AR pesos (three years ago it was 9 AR pesos), and so I don’t think I’ll be able to donate anything.

The only way I can help you guys is if you want me as a beta tester later on, and buying the game once it’s released, but I’m afraid I won’t be patroning you –is that how you say it? Look mom, I’m interneting

This I always fear. I’ve seen authors write long essays about their characters and a part of me can’t help but whisper You could’ve finished the last chapter instead of writing this… but that’s me being selfish, because in the end it’s your time guys, and your story, and your lives, and you should do whatever you want.

What I’m trying to say is, give it a try so you can decide if it works for you or if it isn’t your thing, but try it (said every bisexual ever). Diaspora is my favorite wip and you my favorite authors, so I’ll be cheering you on :slight_smile:

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I think in general patreon is great for authors. The main issue is having a large enough audience that you actually get enough patrons to make all that extra work worth it. I know a number of people don’t even worry about it until they’re on their second game (especially if it’s a sequel or something) where they have an established base of fans they can draw from. When you’re still mostly focusing on building the audience, I don’t know if it’s helpful to have stuff that’s locked away behind a paywall, as the main goal is exposure. Not that I know a lot about how patreon works for authors, but this is what I’ve found for contemplating using patreon for art.

I have seen one author that uses patreon more like a time-delay where patrons would get first dibs on content and then it would become free a month or so later. I thought that was an interesting compromise. Though of course this only works because she has fans willing to pay for early access.

I also like ko-fi a lot since it doesn’t feel like as much of a commitment. Plus for people with less stable incomes (one of whom being me) they can throw you some money when they have it and don’t have to worry about it otherwise (which I would like to do!).

You are both very skilled and friendly, so I’m sure all you guys need is enough people to find you. :+1:

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“Congratulations! You’ve reached the current end of Diaspora ’s demo.”
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! Don’t end!! Just one more page! Please… :sob:

Theatrics aside, I’m loving this. The writing is very well done, the story is really fleshed out with an interesting plot, and the choices feel meaningful. Keep up the great work!

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When I mentioned a patreon it wasn’t something I was expecting added work to be done one the side if I am to be completely honest. It was more something I just thought would be nice for how much work you have already put into your story. Your work is already going to be considerably longer than most CoG’s or HG’s out there and so a little extra cash while you are developing couldn’t hurt I am sure.

Those things you are putting forward to do additionally are nice but don’t forget that it pulls you away from working on your main story. There is no doubt about it that if you start a patreon you will begin to feel pressured to release content for your paying subscribers. Perhaps just keep that work load minimal and have other incentives for people to donate like active involvement on some of the plot points or give more backstory on the cine. Anything that you do however should not be on a timed basis, it just comes up when it does. Then the patreons know you guys are still giving them content but you don’t feel any rush to put it up. It’s evident that you guys can provide both quality and quantity but this story has had a long development phase with no time schedule to publish for you so don’t sweat it.

This is honestly an incredible cyoa story and has had me read the demo four times in the past three days just to explore different options and see how people react in different ways, the writing is top class. Better than most works I’ve read. I honestly do hold this up to what I perceive as the greater long works such as the infinity series, Lords of Aswick and so on. I wont mention them all, it just takes away from the focus that should be on the work you two are creating. Thank you both for letting the community continue to see development this far into the game.

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Awsome writing and great pacing, loved it

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This is rapidly becoming my favorite WIP game. I’m delighted by how you’ve framed choosing which faction to support. There is no “right” choice. There’s no “righteous but unwise” choice contrasted with the “politic but cold-hearted” choice. There are only choices and depending on what your character values most and what they’re willing to compromise on, any choice can mean any number of things. That’s hard to do and so far you’re doing it crazy well. There are no real villains, just people working to advance their own goals and I love that. I don’t much like Adriana and Baltasar, because they’re making problems for me and have priorities and values that clash with mine, but I can recognize that within their own cultural and moral and personal framework they’re doing what they think is the right thing. They’re not being obstacles AT ME.

I’m enjoying the world building as well. A lot of game writers lean hard into inventing fantasy-versions of things that have an exact real world equivalent, like having a Righlls rule over a Casrovov with help from a Reedslid instead of just having a king rule over a kingdom with help from a parliament. I think that makes things unnecessarily difficult to parse on the fly and if there are more than three unexplained, wholly invented terms on a page I tend to bail. You don’t fall into that trap. The new terms you introduce are explained as they appear, they’re for things that either don’t have real world equivalents or are used to highlight culture clash and they aren’t so numerous that I have to keep navigating to a glossary to remember that “Nyarlathrah” just means “priest.”

I know it’s not a “romance game” but the romance! It’s so good! I’ve played through with Izzy, Cormac and Pan (haven’t noticed any bugs or typos in any of the playthroughs, btw) but guys. GUYS. Sangarinus is a precious awkward angel baby deer and I will not hear a word against him. I want to squirrel him away on the island and have him do woodworking and stay home with our 12 tall children while I’m away trading and raiding. He is my favorite. Like, to the point where I find myself being more conciliatory than I would otherwise be toward the Castulians because I don’t want any friction. And all the other romance options work to complicate things too! If you’re playing a character who would like nothing more than to be absorbed into the Castulian empire but you also really want to romance Cormac, that’s a source of tension. If you want to throw in with the Iskendi while romancing Pan, that’s a problem. It makes the replay value really high if you want to see how things go if you plow full speed ahead toward one goal with a complimentary love interest (reject the Iskendi/Pan, join the Iskendi/Cormac) versus conflicting loyalties.

Also, I just went through the tumblr and apparently Sangarinus rehomes stray cats because he worries about the barrack’s hounds bothering them. He is a 6 and a half foot tall super-soldier who carves figurines of baby animals and rehomes stray cats in his spare time. I refuse to believe that this character was not intended to be everyone’s favorite.

Tldr: You’re great and I’m looking forward to the next update.

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Another way to provide for patreons that’s hugely popular is having delayed updates for non-patreons. Say, patreons receive the update 1mont/2weeks (might do it by tiers) before you put it in public.

Anyways, I found your game by pure chance and its fucking awesome, keep it up :smiley:

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i think the most easy choice if you want to do a patreon is close the future content of diáspora for public after you have enough for a demo, then as thanks to your patreons you let them continue to look and read your game, that way you will still be focused in the game and not working in anything else beside it, thats make it more content for your game while you are getting support and people cant complain since they are getting content reading your game dev.:wink:

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It only took us forever, but the Chapter 6 Interlude is finished and playable now, and we’re confident you’ll enjoy this one quite a bit. What we have for you here is an Izzy personal quest (should you choose to accept it), and a few interlude scenes afterwards to lead us up to the start of our great voyage into the storm. This is the first of our personal side quests, so we’re especially interested in how you feel that part of the update is. Our goal wasn’t to provide a pass/fail scenario of helping a character out and earning their loyalty or some such, but rather to put the player in a situation where they can influence the development of the character in the way they feel is best.

We’re excited to see what everyone makes of it. We’ll be taking a bit here to collect feedback and squash any bugs, field questions on our tumblr on the daily, and maybe write up a survey for you guys, since we’re extremely curious about the choices you’ve been making, and that sort of thing is hard to get a sense of just from individual feedback.

Enjoy! And thank you everyone for the discussion on the Patreon subject. It’s something we’ll be thinking more about going forward here.

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I love your game! Hope you are having a great day!

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Well, the last time I posted here was in August of last year (!), but this remains one of my favorite WIPs and I thought it was only fair I come back and share my thoughts, especially after such an awesome update!

Izzy’s personal quest was everything I’d hoped it would be. It was super intense, with her mother arguing with her about staying there, finding the kid, and then having to choose between going through with the original plan or going down a different path…I definitely felt like my choices mattered there, and will probably go back later to try a different outcome! Izzy’s mom was quite the interesting character.

I really enjoyed the dialogue (it’s always so natural!) and the interactions with the characters, especially that scene with Roise aka Chief Mom. I loved how she was willing to share some serious insight about whatever relationship the MC was involved in. She called my Izzy-romancing MC out for burning down that house! “You know quite well that raiding and razing are very different things, and what you leave behind you has consequences.” Wow, what a great line.

The group scene at the end was also amazing. I really loved the option to dramatically ask everyone for…their favorite color. I laughed quite a bit at that, and it was the perfect choice for my jokester MC. (Side note: the humorous MC reminds me a lot of purple Hawke from DA2!)

Anyway. This update made my day! (And probably my weekend as well.) :grin:

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Ainsling: What’s our approach, bardach?

DEAMAN: [unintelligible drooling]

DEAMAN: KILL EVERYONE

Governor: I will not be overawed by threats.

DEAMAN: KILL EVERYONE

General: How about an alliance?

DEAMAN: KILL EVERYONE

Cormac: Our enemies back home outnumber us. We can’t just–

DEAMAN: EVERYONE

Pan: But the Empire can do so much good–

DEAMAN: EVERYONE

Baltasar: Your father was a good friend of mine, and quite close to the Iskendi.

DEAMAN: [considers]

DEAMAN: KILL EVERYONE

Isadora: Could you help me with some family troubles?

DEAMAN: YES BY KILLING EVERYONE

Cormac: But there’s a child in the–

DEAMAN: KILL EVERYONE

Ainsling: Everything seems brighter here down south.

DEAMAN: STOP BEING A STROPPY B—T ABOUT YOUR PERSONAL FREEDOMS OR I’LL KILL YOU TOO

Roise: You can’t solve all our problems with murder.

DEAMAN: watch me

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I may disapprove of what you choose, but will write (to death) a game such that you can choose it!

…“disapprove” is a strong word, but the joke doesn’t work if I stray too far from the original syntax.

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So I’m going to pretend I didn’t squeal like a girl when I saw the update…

Think I’ve found a bug. I couldn’t get Sangarinus to help me with Izzy’s quest even though the code says I should have. I was romancing him, had his friendship at 52% and I chose the less violent path.

Which is just too bad, I really would have liked to have him there. Quests are a lot more fun when there’s someone vaguely disapproving of everything that’s going on.

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YAY! UPDATE!

I enjoyed the Izzy side quest. I assume that Sangarinus just flat won’t go with us no matter what because I was seriously dumping everything into building trust with him on that playthrough and he was Not Having It. I don’t think I can get his friendship meter any higher than I had it at that point. Pan was surprisingly down to B&E. Maybe not surprisingly. I feel really nervous having them along though. They’re sneaky. I like them, but they’ve clearly got a lot going on under the surface and it turns out I’m much more uncomfortable giving them dirt on me than I thought. So I learned something, which is always nice. I do like that Cormac is kind of the dummy option for every character, no matter what else was going on romantically or politically. Cormac got to hit people, so he was happy as a clam at high tide. If it’s not a spoiler or anything, is that scene where you have the option to steal something going to come back or it it pure characterization? It felt very “This Is Going To Be Important Later” but I could just be paranoid.

I think I may have found a bug. I’m playing as a female character but when Roise brings up talking to Sangarinus I have the option of asking if she’s alright with possibly never having biological grandchildren and having her reassure me. I suspect that option was supposed to be greyed out unless I’m playing as male or nonbinary (?) because I can’t think of any other reason to think bio-kids were unlikely. I say I think it’s a bug, not know it is, because I’m open to the possibility of Sangarinus being so awkward when he spoke to Roise that him getting it together enough to produce grandchildren seemed a distant possibility.

In the drinking game I asked the kissing question and Sangarinus didn’t kiss anyone until he was 19 and guys you can’t keep doing this to me everything in me wants to hoist the black flag against the Empire but I can’t deal with upsetting the adorable little chipmunk so I have to keep trying to impress his aunt. I’ve had relationships like this.

I am veerrrrrry suspicious of Pan’s letter. It could be nothing. But it’s clearly something.

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@Jaybirdy @AugustArria
Spelling error in the fourth interlude.

It serves the purpse surprisingly well.

Purpose

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Sangarinus will refuse to help on the more violent path regardless of friendship levels, but he definitely can be convinced to come along on the less violent approach, so that sounds like a bug. We’ll look into it.

Also, @BrownBetty, assuming you’re talking about the item you can potentially steal during Izzy’s quest, there’s supposed to be a scene that comes up regarding that when the player is back on Divio. Did that not happen for you? Might be another bug. And I’ll have to check with Kiku on the other part.

I found the same bug with a male character and Aesling

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Okay, I think I fixed the bug where Sangarinus and Aisling were refusing to come along. If I did, it was literally a matter of parentheses. As it usually is when I screw something up.

I also think I fixed the thing where the theft choice doesn’t come up again, but I’m less sure of that one since I don’t know that what I changed will actually make any difference. So if you all are never again hearing about those stolen items, please let us know.

@BrownBetty the reason you can choose that option despite being a female and romancing a male character is because, well, the game code doesn’t differentiate between e.g. cisgender and transgender women, and any woman could have known fertility issues or have previously expressed to her mom that she doesn’t want kids, or any number of things along these lines. I tried coding this so that the option would only come up for pairs who would be unable to have kids for bio reasons, but realized that this was exclusionary to people playing (for example) trans characters, and also wouldn’t work for nonbinary characters (as some of them could and some could not have kids with the various ROs, depending on things I don’t want to force anyone to specify.)

So I went with making it an option for everyone for any reason, and figured that if it didn’t apply to someone’s character, they’d just have an easy time not picking it. :slight_smile:

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Fantastic new chapter! Especially liked how everyone had an opinion about the approach.

On that note, on the path that we murder the guy, is there any chance that we could not burn the house down and just quietly sneak away?