Welcome!

This blog is a continuation of the developer diaries I previously posted on my Patreon site. I’ve decided to discontinue the Patreon and post my dev diaries on this blog instead.

All the posts on this blog before this one were originally Patreon posts that I’ve copied over to this blog and back-dated. Most of them were originally for $1 Patreon backers, but they’re now available for free.

I’ll continue to post the same developer diaries I was posting on Patreon. If you want to get email notifications, enter your email address in the subscription box on the right hand side. Alternatively if you use an RSS reader you can point it at https://johnayliff.com/blog/index.php/feed/.

I’ve copied all of my old developer diaries over to the new blog and back-dated them to when they were originally published on Patreon, so people who were never my patrons can go back and read them if they want to.

The “your name in the credits” and “exclusive preview versions” Patreon rewards will no longer be a thing. My future games won’t have backers in the credits, and if I do any kind of demos or preview versions they’ll be free. If your name is already in the credits of one of my old games it’ll stay there, I won’t be editing them out.

I’ll leave my Patreon active for a while in order to give everyone a chance to read this post’s sister post there, and then I’ll shut it down. I won’t make any more paid updates so patrons won’t be charged again.

Why I’m making this change

Patreon has announced that it’s going to stop doing per-creation memberships and move all creators to a monthly subscription model. Apparently this is a change being forced on them by Apple in order to have a Patreon app in the app store. I suspect this is an excuse for a change they wanted to make anyway, but whatever.

When I started this Patreon I chose the per-creation model because I couldn’t commit to producing something every month and I didn’t want to charge people for months in which I didn’t produce anything. That’s still the case, so a monthly-subscription Patreon is not the right platform for me.

To be honest I had been considering moving away from Patreon even before this change. When I started this Patreon my idea was that I’d create lots of small games and release them for free, and my Patreon would give people a way to support that. I did release some small games using this model, but most of my time is now spent working on larger games, first Beyond the Chiron Gate, and now Empire and Legacy. Those games make money through sales, and a multi-tier pledge model doesn’t make sense for them.

But while Patreon no longer makes sense as a business model, it still works for me as a blog. Posting regular dev diaries helps me to stay focused and to engage with my audience, and I want to keep the archive of old posts so I can look over it to see how far I’ve come (and sometimes look up exactly when I released a particular thing). So it’s time for me to move the blog over to a site that I control.

Thank you!

If you’re coming here from Patreon, thank you, one final time, for your support. This Patreon never became a major source of income for me, but having a community of people who I know are looking forward to my games has been an immense encouragement and has kept me going when I might otherwise have given up. I hope you’ll follow me over to my new blog and continue to engage with the dev diaries there as you did here.