Nin Online Patreon

[Ueda]

Click here to visit the Patreon page

Dear Ninja,

Why Patreon?

Patreon is a site where audiences can pledge a fixed amount of donations per month / per update to a project they believe in. It helps handle a lot of potential middle-man work that might incur from handling donations manually.

 

Patreon was once used for a couple of months in 2017 when I had a tough time transitioning from living with family to renting. I'm eternally grateful for the support back then, even with just a couple of hundred dollars a month, it made all the difference in my quality of life for that tough period in my life.

What is the Goal?

I'm officially bringing Patreon back, but this time, with the goal of allowing the community to contribute to a specific cause in Nin Online. Every dollar gained from this platform will go directly into hiring additional staff for the game team.
The first goal is to get an entry-level game programmer full-time to program alongside Wolf. The second goal is to get a full-time gameplay designer to work on balancing content and additional content.

Why not just work with volunteers?

For programming, it takes a high-level of skill to work on any MMORPG. Networked games are exponentially harder to work on than ordinary single-player games, especially MMO architecture. This is made harder with our custom engine built in C#, nowadays, most game programmers prefer to work in a game engine like Unity or Unreal. To make any changes worth getting anyone involved in, it takes a long time to get acclimated into the development environment/pipeline, and volunteers that will come and go are not usually worth the time commitment to train. We've tried working with volunteers for years at the start of the game's development and it just doesn't work for a project like Nin Online. The skill requirement is too high and people that have that level of skill don't work for free.

Gameplay Designer is also an actual profession, and although slightly easier to study and there are a lot of game designers who want experience, it takes a lot of time commitment that people who are qualified usually wouldn't do for free. The trouble is that Nin Online is not exactly the best portfolio/resume piece for the industry, and hence, we've yet to get really qualified volunteers for it.

Why not just freelance everything?

Freelancers come with the benefit of usually being more cost effective, but at the cost of being unreliable. Without a dedicated project manager handling freelancers, its a pain to work with freelancers day in and day out, chasing for datelines. We need people we can rely on for the long-term and not for short term projects.

Unfortunate Reality

Nin Online players want features and changes faster than we can make it, and we want to present the opportunity to change that. So if you support the work we've done thus far, we hope you can go one step further and donate to our Patreon.

 

If we do not hit the initial goal, the money from the Patreon will go towards helping alleviate the current costs of operations. As it is, Nin Online costs thousands of dollars a month to sustain, and although we are doing fine, any contribution will help us greatly.

Regards,

Rory