Hello there once again. As you may know we launched the Patreon for LoreMaster.io a couple of weeks ago now. This has been the single biggest step in getting LoreMaster.io off the ground so far! Now people can actually try it out for themselves. In this blogpost we will discuss why we chose Patreon, and what impact that will have on the future development of LoreMaster.io.
Why Patreon?
During the closed alpha, we got a lot of great feedback. One of the main things that kept getting mentioned, was that the users thought it was good as is. They wanted access to it now, so that they could use it properly. We all knew that after the closed alpha the testers would lose access to their worlds as development continued. We found however, that that was a big issue with using LoreMaster.io as intended. If your world disappears in a month, why spend all this time creating it in the first place?
The reason why we limited the closed alpha to a month was because we had to pay for the servers out of our own pocket. Being students, this was not optimal, but we could do it because we included the alpha in our studies. Now that we have all graduated, we need another source of income to cover the alpha costs. We have earlier mentioned using Kickstarter to launch a campaign that would fund development. The issue with a kickstarter is that it is all or nothing, and if we gather the money, then it will still be some time before users can actually gain access. Instead, with Patreon, we can kind of “soft launch” the subscription form, and people can gain early access by subscribing. Furthermore, the server costs are super scaleable, so even with very few subscribers, the costs of the servers are being covered entirely.
Patrons’ Impact on Development
Having users during the development stage also helps us immensely in bugfinding, and feature development. We want to include our patrons every step of the development, and have already started doing so. Patrons get a say in what features come next, and what works, and what does not work.
We still have so many things we want to include in LoreMaster.io. Determining what needs implementing next is very difficult, because all these feature concepts are our babies. That is why we leave these choices in the hands of our patrons. Last week we conducted a feature poll for our patrons to determine our prioritization order. Based on the highest voted results, we have created a road map for the next leg of development for LoreMaster.io. That road map can be seen here. We plan to keep this road map updated when we launch new features, but some of these are bigger than others, and thus requires more development time!
Currently we are working on “In-Line Linking” a new way to link the content in LoreMaster.io. In-line links allow you to create direct links in your text instead of using the link panel. We are still fine tuning how exactly this will work, but that is the next big update to LoreMaster.io!
If you want to join the Patreon, so that you can try out LoreMaster.io and get a say in the future, you can do so here! Otherwise that is all for now.
All the best,
The LoreMaster.io Team!
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In the realm of Loremasterio, all of the world’s lore is kept in the Archives of Effortless Access. 
Because the waters of Loremasterio are difficult to navigate, the cartographers of the realm have had to get creative!