TerranovaTeam @ Patreon

[krzys_h]

I've constructed the base on https://patreon.com/TerranovaTeam, it's not yet visible for everyone, but I'd like to show you some screenshots: http://i.imgur.com/UuO86zE.png, http://i.imgur.com/u33oEIQ.png, http://i.imgur.com/6H0VXgG.png, http://i.imgur.com/YUInosN.png

I feel like these goals are too big for a start. Looking at the amount of donations we get, I personally don't think we'll even reach the first one. I'd rather start small - something like $5/month, $10/month, $20/month and so on. Of course, the rewards for these wouldn't be too big, but it's something to start with.

We were open, but after this, we will have to be much more restrictive with members of our team. The team will need to be stable. I think we should split the money less communistically - basing on amount of work done. Otherwise it will probably end up with no people working, as "everyone will get money anyway". It will be no motivation if everyone will get money even if rarely do anything!

Exactly, the money should be split by the amount of work done. The only problem is, how do we measure the amount of work done? Diffrent people work on diffrent things, so it's not possible to split by e.g. the amount of changed lines in the code or commits, because you can't count people who do graphics this way.

The source code will still be visible for everyone and there is a chance that there may be created a group of people more skilled than us, who will fork our code and encourage people to move to their's project because of different approach, more releases and so on. Not only we'll lost our chance for patrons, but also our years of work will be basically stolen from us, which may end good for the game itself, but it would probably end this beautiful community.

This kind of problem exists in EVERY open source project. The only way to avoid that is to make our version the best one. Also remember, that GPL license allows anybody to create a fork, but also allows us to merge code from that fork back into the main repository if we decide so.
See also http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html...edVersions

Are we really up to the challenge? What if we will fail our patrons? It's not like we are full-time professionals, we are still learning and effects of our work might not be as good as we would want them to be. Especially, a marketing might be a problem. Our homepage isn't even done yet, we lack organisation, we have a huge mess, we don't have a landing page, we don't have any specific roadmap which we can show to our users. I think we should have at least one person responsible fully for marketing, who will tell us what needs to be done (not because of internal project issues, but because of need to show something), scare us with deadlines, criticise everything, make sure to deliver content to our users in best way possible and much more...

Yes, that's true - we aren't proffessionals. But do we really need to be?

Are there any other open source projects like our's, which use Patreon? It's a little odd to me and there might be unforeseen consequences of doing it in our case. Most of us don't even know each other in reality, how can we trust each other in splitting the money and getting the job done?

I think that after all these years we can trust each other, but that's just my opinion.

Plus, Patreon causes some less known problems, especially in artistic areas. While great idea in theory, it changed the way some artists handle commissions. Patrons are often privileged group and they can even require you to do stuff for them or else they leave. I don't like that. I know some artists who have lost most of their patrons because they refused to make erotic art and were basically forced to make it to get those patrons back. I wouldn't want to be forced to add some idiotic stuff to Colobot because someone pays me for it.

Well, this is serious disadvantage. We want to remake this game and if our patrons would require from us to changing whole game (like "add shooting to aliens from neutron gun"), our all efforts would became pointless.

I think that open source projects are supposed to be driven by the community. If the community wants us to implement some crazy feature, why don't listen to them? Isn't that why we are working on C:GE, to make it better, at least in our understanding? If not, what are we even doing here?
Remember, this is world of open source, so even if we deny to implement some feature that will be hugely requested, somebody can make a fork and implement that. If that turns out to be something that is good for the game and community, we can still pull that idea back to the main project.