Very Important Veeder Patreon News

Nobody can blame you for forgetting about the Ryan Veeder Patreon thing, because it launched way back in February and since then I have released zero games. Also, maybe you never heard about it in the first place.

Well, besides the projects I’ve been working on secretly since February, I have more recently been working on a submission to PetJam, the Virtual Pet Game Jam, and when this project reached a certain critical mass I decided to make it my first Patreon-supported game. It is called The Island of Doctor Wooby, and it will be released sometime in the next twelve hours, because apparently the PetJam deadline has been moved backwards? What the heck?!

Now, all these sentences may constitute “news,” and from certain perspectives could be construed as “important,” but the thing that qualifies any of the above as Very Important is this: Patreon supporters of a certain pledge level are entitled to an annotated version of an older game of mine along with the release of each new game of mine. The annotated source code that I will be sending out to those supporters along with the release of this Doctor Wooby game is that of Taco Fiction.

I have said on multiple occasions that the source of Taco Fiction would never be publicly released. However, in the near future (although probably not in the next twelve hours, jeez), it will be non-publicly released, and those individuals to whom it is released will be bound by sacred honor never to share it with anybody else, ever. The only other way to get this PDF will be to look for it on one of those torrent sites, and then only after somebody bothers to upload it to that site after forgetting their sacred honor.

(These annotations are pretty good, in my opinion. I’ve gone through the text at least three times, annotating and re-annotating, and I’ll probably get around to doing another pass before I send it out.)

If you feel strongly that you are entitled to read the Taco Fiction source code, then I urge you to check out the Patreon page linked above and to pledge whatever the matching amount is (seven dollars), and I thank you for your interest. If you have no such interest, then I thank you for your honesty.

The Island of Doctor Wooby has been released and this is that thing.

I like the separate window with the parser tips. There was a relevant discussion around about tutorials, and I remarked that I’d seen an Adventure port where the tutorial/hints were in a separate window that way. The discussion was already done by that time, so the remark went unadressed, but it’s pretty much exactly what you did. I like it very much. If it were adaptive it’d be a perfect, unobtrusive tutorial.

The wait is over: I finally have more Very Important Veeder Patreon News.

1. The Weekly Coding Challenge

In the vein of those fun events from the Second Quadrennial Exposition, I’m trying out a Weekly Coding Challenge in which Patreoneers can test/share/show off their skills. Remember the event where people wrote games with beautiful source text? Kind of like that.

2. Old Annotations

A Vault has been established to collect all my old source code annotations, which previously were kind of all over the place. Access to this Vault is a special reward for those very generous Patreoneers whose lifetime support of the Ryan Veeder Patreon adds up to $200 or more.

I’m going to be releasing some of those old annotations publicly in the near future, but that’s not exactly Patreon news. It is Expatreonic news.

3. The “Guidance Tier”

Inspired by my role model Crafsman, I am adding a $10/month tier for people who want me to help them with their projects, as long as they’re the type of projects I can help with—mostly Inform 7 projects. (Or trivia night design. Or treasure hunt design…)

Is this a dubious tier? Perhaps. It is not difficult to get help with your projects in this day and age. If you’re having trouble with your Inform 7 project, you can get a lot of assistance at these forums right here. If you want help from me specifically, you just have to ask me. You don’t have to sign up for any special service!

But you might not like showing your unfinished or nonfunctional work to everybody. And I sometimes prioritize the task of responding to certain emails below certain other tasks, such as playing the new Zelda game. Only by joining a special $10/month Patreon tier can you assure yourself of the personal attention that a special $10/month Patreon tier implies.

Thank you for your interest.