October 17, 2018

Dear Patrons and Users,

As some of you might have noticed, last week saw a huge increase in number of users in the app and in the discord. This is all part of a greater plan that I have for Kanka, for the community and for myself, which I'll describe with this announcement.

The 27th of October will mark the one year anniversary since I've started working on Kanka. What started out as a way for me to organise my homebrew world in something easier to use and share than a MediaWiki has transformed into an app with several thousand users and an active community on Discord. It no longer only serves my needs, but it helps users plan and manage their worlds and campaigns, and allowing them to spend more time on the fun parts of running a game, and less time on the boring book keeping. Kanka's goal is and will remain to allow people to have more fun.

With a growing user base comes more responsibility. Working on the app, being responsive to user's desires and questions, filming tutorial videos, writing monthly announcements, making sure the servers run smoothly, all of these things and more are taking a larger and larger chunk of my time every week.

My motivation and love for this project and community hasn't wavered one bit, quite the contrary. It has grown and continues to do so with each happy user.

So I've decided I want to try something crazy, because I want to be able to dedicate more time to work on Kanka, on adding awesome features that make session prep and running the game more fun. I've reworked the Patreon goals and added an option that, if reached, would allow me to reduce my working hours.

25$ - cover monthly costs (AWS is cheap but growing rapidly in costs)

100$ - double the server capacity + upload multiple files per entity

1200$ - allow me to reduce my working hours to 80% and dedicate a whole day per week working on Kanka

The amazing people who already support Kanka on Patron represent 0.6% of all accounts. If I want this life changing goal to be achieved, I need to figure out ways to help people decide they want to help me on this journey. While hiding features behind a paywall makes the most sense from a financial perspective, it is not something I currently wish to do or feel would be right. My aim is to improve existing features for people who support the app.

I've also been monitoring the image hosting costs on AWS with the arrival of new users and have been warned that the current 8MB file upload (it says 10MB in the interface, but it's 8) could quickly spiral out of control in terms of monthly costs.

With these two main things in mind, here are some of the changes I will bring to the application in the following weeks.

A new Hall of Fame on the "About" page thanking Patrons

Decrease the file upload to 2MB for non-Patrons, and keep it at 8MB for Patrons

Decrease the location map upload to 2MB for non-Patrons, and increase it to 10MB for Patrons

Option to increase the amount of entities shown on a page to 100 (or infinite scrolling) for Patrons

Option to increase the amount of entities shown on the dashboard for Patrons

Nicer default pictures for entities for Patrons

Along with these changes in the app, I want to spend more time to reward Patrons with the following:

Patrons can vote at the beginning of each month on the features to prioritize.

Monthly Twitch stream talking about the app or worldbuilding / dming, with Patrons having priority on the questions asked, or other bonuses related to Twitch (still figuring this out as this is out of my usual skill set)

What does this mean for existing files that have already been uploaded? They stay as is. Only new file uploads are impacted by these changes.

As with all things related to Kanka, this is not final and very much a starting point. The changes outlined here won't happen overnight, some being faster for me to implement than others. My goal is as always to build cool things so that people can have more fun playing my favourite hobby, and I hope that these changes and new plans will help me achieve such a goal.

This announcement was made as the same time as 0.12 was released, so make sure to check that out too!

If you want to talk about these changes and suggest ideas and improvements, feel free to contact me at [email protected], the r/kanka subreddit, or by joining the Discord.

Thank you for reading this until the end.

Ilestis / Jay