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[Capntastic]

I've heard CafePress is pretty crummy, at least shirt-wise.  Of course, I wouldn't trust them for anything I'd be drinking out of, either.

I'm assuming that what would be ideal for this would be something people want, something cheap to supply, and something that doesn't take a bunch of time preparing and shipping.  I have some ideas but nothing too bright yet.

What would be neat, I think, is if instead of direct merchandise, there was some way of rewarding people who donated frequently and muchly.  For example,  donating 10 dollars a month might get you something groovy once you reach 50 dollars.  It could be like the prize shelf at Chuck E. Cheese in that donating more over a period time would bump you into the next 'prize bracket'.   Because having an extra motivation to shell out cash is always nice.   A popular browser-based game. Kingdom of Loathing's donation scheme is based on getting a decently powerful item upon donation of 10 dollars.   This item is tradeable for items in an in-game shop that changes inventory every month, making last month's item incredibly rare, and making incentive to donate 10$ a month to get these items.  Of course, something like this wouldn't work for DF as it isn't multiplayer or anything, but something similar would be neat.

But essentially, some small (Semi?)tangible token of appreciation every month or two for  supportive donators would be a great motivator.  On top of the drive to support the game already, of course.

[DDouble]

Some of these ideas seem like they might create too much of a distraction or time-sink to manage. Dealing with the logistics of donations/personalized merchandise seems a bit far out for a two man team. But, what do I know...

And it would be really fun to donate $25 and get a mousepad with "&" and dwarves and arrows everywhere, maybe a heroic fight on a bridge over the chasm.

[Capntastic]

Like I said, the ideal thing would be something that doesn't take much time or effort to hand out.

[Aquillion]

In the spirit of Dwarf Fortress, if you donate 100$ or more you should get a herd of elephants delivered to your front door.

[Capntastic]

Or a small cube of a strange and mysterious metal.

Woe betide the poor soul who manages to crack it open.

[Toady One]

Re: donation targets, it seems like, if we're eventually hoping to support insurance and living expenses for two people, we'd just be either setting targets to be missed or capping potential at this point, depending on how things go.  And I can't really hazard a guess of how things will go since it has been surprisingly good so far.

The last version was downloaded 2800 times from Saturday to Thursday.

I guess if I can't arrange a herd of elephants, I could bring you to a herd.  Maybe a plane ticket and an apprenticeship to someone who handles work elephants?  Really though, I'm not sure what I can handle.  I'd send thank you notes to the donors as I receive each notification email, but when I get a donation notification it doesn't include a permission to reply, and people can be very sensitive about their inbox content.  Anything that involves me packing and mailing leads to various postal troubles and less programming.  Even the notion of receiving anything tangible leads to potential for miscommunication and "where's my stuff?", and any reward sets up tiers of people in a minor way, though that might be an unreasonable way to talk about a token of appreciation.

[jRaskell]

I don't have any concrete specifics along this idea, but one possibility to think about generating additional donations is to make those donations in some way tangible in the game itself.

It'd have to be done in a fashion that made it easy to manage, which would of course require some programming framework in place before such an option was made available.

The most obvious example of what I'm thinking about is for each donation, allow a character in the world to be named after/by the donator, assuming such name is acceptable and appropriate.  That may still be too much to manage though.

Not much of an option for those who wish to remain private, anonymous, but I'd be more apt to make a significant donation if doing so could in some way allow me to put my own fingerprint on the game itself, and this game is of a scope that could allow for a LOT of fingerprints.

Just something to think about.

[dav]

I'll donate regardless for as long as I'm having so much fun/am seeing updates.  I've always been turned off by "bonuses" - I won't "undonate," but I don't like the idea that some people are better because they donate (more).  We're not all on equal economic footing.  For some folks, five bucks is a lot.  Others can easily contribute as much as for a commercial game.

[Capntastic]

Well the idea is that they'd act like a reminder so people would be sure to donate every month, which would help to allow the donation money to be a slightly more reliable form of income.

[odd2k]

I suggest something much less extravagant, namely a list of all the donors. The list could be included on the main webpage, the forums and even inside the readme/release notes of the game. But from what I've heard, you don't have any way of identifying donors as of yet. Is there any way to attach a message to the paypal transaction, maybe?

Anyway, I think a lot of people donate just to support the developer, and don't neccessarily want a huge plush tentacle demon or what have you.

Oh, and I guess I might as well say it here, I donated 22 dollars and 17 cents to your cause, Toady.

[Toady One]

What I've figured out how to do for now is a thank you page (at least, it's supposed to work).  I've put the initial text here, so you can look at it.  I'm sick right now (when one of your students is showing symptoms during the test, your own weekend could be special), so it might be off, but there it is.  The payment page should go there after it is done, and it gives me something to customize in case anything changes.

I think a voluntary list of donors sounds reasonable, though I'm open to your thoughts on the matter.  The "thanks" page could ask you to email if you'd like to be listed.  A separate email is an extra hassle for the donor, but sending email is pretty easy, and you can confirm your payment was processed at the same time in that way.  It also wouldn't take long for me to handle this each day (I wish it would! he he he).

There are a couple of reasons why I'm not for game fingerprints...  it's an alpha so they'd likely have to be tracked and replaced after being destroyed, which could become a task.  Also, depending on how it works, it possibly fixes the tone of the game (making it zany and anachronistic), and I'd like to keep that malleable.  It also ties a payment to content distributed with the game, which is the kind of thing I'd really like to avoid since I don't understand the ramifications.

[arthurx]

i have nothin else to say but thank you very very much for making such an awesome game, i already spent more than 20 hours on it in the past week, and there is no game lately that could seize me so hard(despite all their DX9 graphics) cant wait to see the next version! =D

[Crowley]

Any word on the next version? All of these fixes are getting me antsy.

[Toady One]

Probably tomorrow night.  I was put out of commission (mentally anyway) by my cold so I didn't get a chance to get through everything.  I wanted to finish daily schedules up, but it doesn't look like I'll get the chance.  So the peasants just sit in their new homes.

[Crowley]

Good deal man, sorry to hear about the cold though.

It's probably better for the peasants anyhow, less chance of being burninated indoors.