Hello everyone. This is SupSuper writing to you personally, not as representative of OpenXcom. No light-hearted tone, jokes, or any of the usual stuff. This is a serious post so I don’t wanna waste your time.
I’m sure you’ve noticed my contributions to OpenXcom have been pretty rare lately. Sadly my life has had to take priority, OpenXcom is a hobby I work on in my spare time, my income comes from working full-time as a programmer and it’s very difficult to keep both up without taking a toll on my mental health. I am as sorry about this as much as you, I love my community, I do my best to keep myself available whenever possible, and I hate letting you all down like this.
To make matters worse, 2020 has been a rough year on everyone and I’ve been running into financial difficulties. I talked it over with some friends and they suggested setting up a Patreon. This lets you donate to me monthly, helping support me and my hobbies like OpenXcom. It’s like a subscription, only there are no hidden penalties, you can start, change and stop donations at any time.
So if you’ve been a fan and have money to spare, consider donating to my Patreon and spread the word. You’d be surprised how every little helps. At worst, you will help alleviate my financial troubles. At best, I could work full-time on this and more remakes, without having to juggle jobs. I can’t guarantee you’ll get anything out of it but I’ll be eternally grateful and I’ll do my best to meet your expectations.
If you don’t care I fully understand, I’m not trying to guilt you or ask for charity, just trying to figure out ways to help both of us. This will be my first and last time asking for personal donations on this website. I’d rather keep this related to OpenXcom or more charitable causes. Here’s a FAQ, if you got more questions just ask:
Should I be worried? Nope, whatever happens I’ll come out alright, you don’t need to worry about my well-being or OpenXcom’s. Progress will just be slower or faster depending on my circumstances.
Are you charging for your work? Nope, these are purely recurring donations, it’s all voluntary, same disclaimer applies. If you think it’s weird for an open-source contributor to be “asking for money”, times change, check how many other people are doing the same.
Why not an OpenXcom Patreon? 1. I don’t wanna tie myself down to OpenXcom or pretend “I am OpenXcom”, it’s the community’s project. 2. I don’t wanna drag the rest of the devs down with me, they’re ok with this decision, and some already have their own.
Other donation methods? If Patreon doesn’t work for you, I also have GitHub Sponsors. If you’d rather only donate one time, there’s still PayPal.
OpenXcom 2.0? If you wanna try TFTD and the latest features just use the nightlies. Trust me, there’s nothing wrong with them. But to have a “proper” 2.0 release, I wanna update the docs, website, etc, all to match. The boring stuff, it’ll take time. Also if you want more modding features, consider checking out OpenXcom Extended.
blessed, honestly. i’ll totally sign up as soon as i’m not poor as hell
“I don’t wanna tie myself down to OpenXcom or pretend “I am OpenXcom”, it’s the community’s project.”
then why post it here, on the dedicated openxcom website?
“But to have a “proper” 2.0 release, I wanna update the docs, website, etc, all to match. The boring stuff, it’ll take time.”
it’s been 9 years… lack of a proper release made packaging of the game complicated, development and packaging of mods complicated… take AUR or chocolatey where it’s problematic. and with something like ubuntu I imagine you’re just going to be stuck with the old 1.0 version of the game if you want to use that distro’s repos.
this might be a minor issue, but it ultimately stems from the lack of project management. which also slows down development of the game greatly, and makes people lose interest. immediately daggerfall unity comes to my mind, a similar project that has been progressing like there’s no tomorrow. and not because interkarma is the mythical 10x programmer. he simply cares more about the community as a whole. much more it seems…
and with that said, this post unfortunately comes off as ingenuine.
You really think anyone cares about me outside of OpenXcom? Now you’re being ingenuous.
You’re probably right, but it’s not like anyone wants to replace me. Coders wanna code, not manage. Meanwhile OXC is feature-complete, OXCE has even more features, and the community keeps modding the crap out of it, so it’s not like I’m getting in the way.
opinionated, just be grateful that you are here.
oh wait, who are YOU anyway?!
Troopers; We need to expand our efforts to a broader audience. Now!, is the time we should brainstorm for ideas how to increase our membership – in such a way as we get buy in from supporters to each pay money and make their own efforts to grow this endeavor to the global spanning protection agency it deserves to be. The alien invaders will not conquer themselves!
Budgets MUST be procured, as they are in-game. We must charged people real money to fund this project, and NOT be ashamed to do so. We must ask those that wish to support this project to pay, and not be embarrassed to ask for money. There can be as a reward, different levels of access to play and command, access to technologies, AND….. we should create and expansion game, whereby high contributors (whether game development of high pay customers) get to expand beyond the base game of saving earth to a state of stalemate against alien inclusion; and then – advance into the deep dark space to collect resources, and interact with other species.
If we are really struggling to keep this website alive, and keep people developing the game, and maintain interest from the player base, then it is time to adapt and forge ahead in a new direction.
Either let this project die, as a mewling newborn, or decide, as I have, to grow and change, and make this a better organism.
Your, Thoughts?
Your choice?
LIVE WELL !
– Ardrigal