🌟 Editor's Note
Hey all, it’s been a while since the last update (trust me we know). So we’ll give a nice Spring update for you and the progress being made by everyone here at the FPC. We also have a nice little spot of indie games that will make your Spring.
Pilot Program!!
We are putting together the Pilot Contract™. This is being worked out in the forges of legal Hades to ensure that our pilot program is successful, and no one walks away from this feeling negatively. This is coming up soon! I don’t want to give a hard date to opening the flood gates for project support, but I think this Summer will be an interesting time.
not that kind…but ok
Logo!
We’re working with WhiteFox Designs to create a wonderful logo that works for us. I won’t tell you much more than that because the creative process is long, complex, and not very fun to write about. Definitely check out their art.
wouldn’t YOU like to know?
Funding!
We are pivoting just a little bit when dealing with our funding models. Over the last year this project has warped and waned in ways that we did not expect. We are still focused on indie development, but we want to make sure that the expectations are clear and concise both for the people giving to the FPC and the studios we are funding. If we want transparency in the games industry, we need to be transparent first. We also want feedback - YES, the dreaded f-word, FEEDBACK from everyone reading this. The changes (should we call them "Patch Notes"?) are below along with the reasoning behind them. Remember we want to fund creatives and enable them to make what they want to make.
Patch Notes (i like it - Dylan):
We originally planned to calculate a livable wage for each studio and fund that directly. That's a great idea in theory, but in practice it meant asking developers to share personal financial details (rent, grocery bills, the works) to justify their funding. That's invasive, and it's not the relationship we want with the people we're supporting. Instead, we're moving to a flat funding cap: up to $5,000 per month per studio, for the duration of their project (up to 24 months). The money still goes to people. We're just not asking them to open their bank statements to prove it. To be clear, transparency is still a requirement. FPC funding goes toward the project, and we do require studios to show where that money went. Tools, licenses, contract work, salaries - if FPC funds covered it, we want receipts. What we're not asking for is your personal rent or grocery bills.
We're also being honest about scale. We want to change the industry, but we can't do that by overcommitting before we have the community to back it up. So we're building this progressively: subscriber milestones fund each studio step by step, and once a studio is fully funded, we start bringing on the next one. Ambition is great and we have plenty of it, but if we sprint a marathon without training, we're going to collapse, and that won't help anyone.
The Math (because transparency):
Every backer is $5/mo. Right now it costs us about $70 a month to keep FPC running. That's the pilot reality - a skeleton crew budget while we get this off the ground. Someday we hope FPC will have paid staff and proper infrastructure, and those costs will grow. But right now, nearly every dollar goes straight to the people making games. Here's what that looks like when it adds up:
100 backers = $500/mo. After operating costs, that's $430/mo going directly to studio funding. That's a tool budget, a software license, a month of contract audio work.
500 backers = $2,500/mo. After costs, $2,430/mo toward a studio. Nearly halfway to full funding.
1,000 backers = $4,930/mo going to a studio. That's effectively one studio, fully funded. A real team making a real game with stable, community-backed support for up to two years.
From there, every additional 1,000 backers brings on another studio. 2,000 backers? Two studios. 3,000? Three. The collective grows with the community.
A podcasting I (Dylan) went!
I chatted with Jonny over at Indie Game Garden (please check them out) and rambled a lot. But if you want to hear what we’re doing and some interesting questions, check out the podcast.
Indie GAMES Spotlight
Usually we do a featured dev, this month (quarter?) we’re doing a couple of indie games that I’ve played and finished since our last Newsletter. So without further:
Grunn is just a very cozy and fun first-person gardening game. It certainly isn’t a horror adjacent time loop game into a town that might best be described as “The Dutch Twin Peaks”. Seriously, it’s a weirdly unsettling game that I had a blast playing and figuring out. It’s short, sweet, and never boring. I’ll give a general warning that there are a few jump scares. I’m not a jump scare defender, but the game has options to turn the noises down (recommended by me, the scaredy cat) and by the second or third loop you’ve interacted with all of the jump scares, and you are just left with the unsettling feeling that you don’t belong in this town. Play this for the vibes!
Some of you may know this genre (and if you don’t be prepared to be wowed) I’ll call it the Obra Dinn like, the Golden Idol Like, the Roottrees are dead like. Games where you have information and you use deductive logic to fill in what exactly happened. Mr. Investigator is one of these games. Is it perfect? No. Does it feel great when you figure out a puzzle? Absolutely. The art style and vibes of this game and melancholic as you play an investigator using some new time travel technology to figure out what happened with a crime scene. The game is short, but oozes potential and it’s worth a try if you need your Golden Dinn . . . Orbra Idol. . . whatever we’ll call these deductive logic games itch scratched. For those of us who love this genre we devour these like locusts since you can’t really replay them. Play this for the smug satisfaction you get for being smarter than everyone else.
Last Tidbits:
Website: we’re cooking things up behind the scenes. Cuba of Shiba Dog Studios is VERY graciously lending us some of his time for some backend development.
Streaming: Dylan and Andy had a great time streaming some demos from the Steam NextFest. We went online and played some demos together to celebrate the kind of creativity this is all about. We’ll be sharing more of that beautiful session in near future and talk about some of the interesting games we played.
Guilds: We had an awesome conversation with some folks who threw out a great idea. Letting backers form guilds on the platform, with names and logos, to work towards funding goals. Rewards for meeting goals, specialty spaces for each guild, etc.
Like what happened here? Share it with some other folks?
Ready to be done with this adventure? That’s ok.
That’s it! That’s the newsletter. What did you think? Was it up to your standards? There’s lots more to come next week, so stay tuned and share FPC out far and wide!
Fund devs, not execs - FPC