legendkeeper
patreon
LK Weekly: Short Term Priorities, Mind-Melding, and Our Commitments to You
🕑 Added 2021-08-23 19:14:08 +0000 UTCWelcome to this inaugural edition of LK Weekly. We are committing to sending weekly updates of our progress from this point on. These will go out to our patrons on Fridays and we'll let you know if we ever need to skip one.
The founding team meets in Dallas
With Adam joining the team full time, it was time to get together in person, meld minds, and talk about our values, hopes, dream, projects... basically everything. This 48-hour meeting was a great success (the only hiccup was Braden's sinus cold)! We made significant progress on many fronts which we will share with you in this update.
From left: Adam, Braden, and Justin. By the time we were finished that whiteboard wall behind Braden was an absolute mess.
We still have a lot to figure out, but a few things solidified which we can talk about now:
The LegendKeeper Vision
We have decided to go all-in on Game Masters in the short term. This means you can expect us to start greenlighting more modules for LegendKeeper that are particular to the jobs Game Masters need to get done. This does not mean we will alienate others' crafts - the core platform should always work for any kind of worldbuilder.
Our Values
Some core values we all believe in:
- Improving your craft
- Supporting your creative process
- Transparency - you should know what we are working on
- Design-lead product development
- Being productive
- Data freedom and autonomy
- Privacy
Main Business Goal
Our top business priority right now is to attract and onboard new users for LegendKeeper. We still need to cross-check our numbers, but the broad-strokes picture of things today is that Justin won't be able to join the team full time until 2023 at our current growth rate.
That simply won't do!
Pricing Model + Export
We have decided to continue with a subscription-based model for accessing LegendKeeper (SaaS). We will not switch to a one-time purchase when v1.0 launches.
We believe that this pricing model, while not perfect for everyone, is the best way to ensure that our incentives align with yours. With SaaS, we have to earn your approval every single month. We will also have no incentive to hold back features for big new version releases - you will get improvements the moment they are ready. Finally, we will be able to focus all our efforts on product development without the need to devote energy to sales.
We will never raise prices for current subscribers. We will be offering lifetime, locked-in pricing for all our current patrons. You are our treasured early believers. Without you, we would not be here. We want to recognize that faith in us by making sure you get a great deal forever. There will have to be a few exceptions to this rule to prevent anyone from abusing it. More details on this later.
We will always ensure you can export your data. Data lock-in is completely against our values. We will commit to maintaining an export feature so that you can leave LegendKeeper at any time, regardless of your subscription status, and can take your work with you. You own that data, not us.
New Worldbuilding Stream
We have decided to launch a new worldbuilding stream. The entire LegendKeeper team will show up on Twitch regularly and use LegendKeeper to build worlds with you. You are all invited. Hijinks will ensue.
Date is still TBD, so stay tuned.
Sign up for The LegendKeeper Newsletter
We are launching a brand new newsletter. Adam is still working on a cooler name.
The LegendKeeper Newsletter goes out once a month. You can expect practical tips and guides for worldbuilding, RPG content, inspirational prompts, and some experimental stuff. It will evolve as we go based on your feedback.
The goal of this newsletter is to have a home for all the great stuff we learn that doesn't immediately fit into the product. Another key goal is to reach people who are not yet in our community directly. To that end, it would mean a lot to us if you could share it with friends you think might be interested.
You can sign up for the newsletter by adding your email to the form on our homepage.
Short Term Project Priorities
⚠️ An important caveat: Shaping our roadmap is an ongoing project - this is not yet final.
Setting the right priorities is incredibly hard, and we still have to do a lot of scoping and risk calculations on these items. That being said, here is what we have right now:
- Design System V3 (In progress) - To ship an invincible Editor and mobile support, our design system needs to evolve. (A design system is a set of components and standards used to build an app.) Justin has already made fantastic progress and we will be showing you sneak peeks in the coming weeks.
- Editor V3 (Stalled) - Braden has already made great progress here but is pausing while Design System V3 gets completed. He is looking into backporting some of the fixes so that we can release them sooner while we wait. The new editor will bring tons of new goodies, such as drag & drop blocks and more customization. Here's a sneaky peek of a much more customizable info block:
- Template Sharing / Community - We already know you all share templates and we love them. It's time for us to start looking at how we can streamline template sharing.
- Onboarding - Our onboarding and sign-up flow leave a lot to be desired. We need to revamp this so that new users can start building as smoothly as possible.
- Public Sharing - We want you to be able to share your creations with the world in a simple, secure way.
- Timeline/Relations - We talked a LOT over the weekend about these huge features. We realized there's a ton of work to be done here, but we've got some cool ideas to bring some useful functionality in the shorter-term. Our highest priority here is bringing you tools that are actually useful and productive.
- Fog of War and Atlas Layers - We have locked in what we think the remaining most important features of the Atlas are.
The full list is much longer, but these are the issues that floated to the top for the near future. As we said at the top, this is still subject to change.
That's it for this week's update. If you want to ask any questions, feel free to do that here or in #patron-paradise in Discord.
Comments
Braden
This is a hard decision, no doubt about it. Thank you for your honest thoughts on this. We are sorry you don't feel valued - you do matter and we hear you loud and clear.
KPM
Keeping the Subscription model is one of the most upsetting news i could possibly hear. I supported this Patreon because i was hoping for a product different from the rest of the world builders like Anvil and the fact that this had plans for a desktop version had me excited for v1.0. After seeing the email I have been seriously distraught over this decision and feeling like I'm being once again being held hostage to support a product I like. Im supporting this because i was looking forward to an upfront fee, I'm supporting because I wanted not to be trapped on the internet when i use a product. I'm supporting because i thought you guys valued my choice to actively support development of my own free will not because I'm anchored to a subscription so that we keep forking out money or loose the privilege to use a product we help fund in the first place. I supporting this because i wanted to get AWAY from things like Anvil World Builder. I would have gladly increased my pleage had you all kept to the one time purchase model. I would have gladly payed for each update, i would have gladly keep supporting if you even gave the option for Patreons to get a limited time one-time purchase offer. Now idk if the desktop app is coming and I have to seriously consider whether or not I can support this patreon any more. And the worst part is that, I feel that to you guy's I'm nothing more than a dollar amount that wont even matter to you whether you get it or not. I'm not valued, I'm just a means to an end.
Really exited for possible future mobile support. It's easily the most requested feature by my ~25 players (I literally have heard about it so many times I'm over it). I understand how lacking underlying architecture can make things like that difficult to implement but I have to stress how much more important of a feature it is to me than anything else on the road map.
