I dislike doing straight donations. I'm happy to buy merchandise, the 20-40% profit is a donation after all; my favorite is shirts with content at both front & back, the back can be text-only or a small logo. Perhaps also you can put an Amazon link on your page so that before making a purchase one goes there and your project will get a cut? Maybe one of of the admins have a 3D printer, or know someone that has one, or can setup an account with a commercial 3D printing shop to sell models? The starting ships model seem like a good start.
I thought this didn't belong here but nozmajner mentioned it was on discord.
Thank you for your consideration
Update 1
If the 3D printing idea is picked up, perhaps you can setup a model painting webcam workshop?
Merch? Amazon link? Other ways to give money than donation.
Re: Merch? Amazon link? Other ways to give money than donation.
> I'm happy to buy merchandise, the 20-40% profit is a donation after all
In terms of developer time invested compared to the number of people who actually support the project financially, I would not consider this to be a particularly prudent direction to go - the time spent preparing merchandise would be much better invested in developing another new / reworked ship (or other art assets, if someone other than Nozmajner were able to do this). That's also not to bring into account that we've had a desire to redesign the Pioneer logo for some time anyways (it features a ship that is no longer in the game).
This might be an option for later down the line when some of the above points are addressed, but the law of averages applied to our userbase indicates that we'd be investing a somewhat significant amount of work into preparing merchandise for 1-3 people to actually purchase. You are more than welcome to grab logo.svg from the game's data files and order a custom T-shirt if you would like to wear the project's merch, however!
> Maybe one of of the admins have a 3D printer, or know someone that has one, or can setup an account with a commercial 3D printing shop to sell models?
Ignoring the fact that preparing a game-ready model for 3d printing isn't the easiest thing in the world and takes artist time away from actually making the ships... the ship models are available freely for any user to print themselves (if they're interested in preparing them), and the financial gain the project would receive at our level of exposure and user traffic would not even come close to compensating the artist for the time taken to prepare the models, much less provide any tangible benefit for the financial situation of the project as a whole.
I'd certainly like a Coronatrix to paint and sit on my desk, but I cannot see this being worthwhile as an "official" product - the nice bit about being open source is that you're just a few clicks away from loading the ship model into a slicer if you want to print one yourself though.
Ultimately, the developers already invest a significant chunk of their personal and sometimes professional time to produce content, features, and fixes, and provide all of the above to you, the users, for free. If defraying the administrative and upkeep costs of the project does not seem like a worthwhile reason to donate, then we have no expectation that users will provide any recompense other than nice words and the occasional useful feedback.
In terms of developer time invested compared to the number of people who actually support the project financially, I would not consider this to be a particularly prudent direction to go - the time spent preparing merchandise would be much better invested in developing another new / reworked ship (or other art assets, if someone other than Nozmajner were able to do this). That's also not to bring into account that we've had a desire to redesign the Pioneer logo for some time anyways (it features a ship that is no longer in the game).
This might be an option for later down the line when some of the above points are addressed, but the law of averages applied to our userbase indicates that we'd be investing a somewhat significant amount of work into preparing merchandise for 1-3 people to actually purchase. You are more than welcome to grab logo.svg from the game's data files and order a custom T-shirt if you would like to wear the project's merch, however!
> Maybe one of of the admins have a 3D printer, or know someone that has one, or can setup an account with a commercial 3D printing shop to sell models?
Ignoring the fact that preparing a game-ready model for 3d printing isn't the easiest thing in the world and takes artist time away from actually making the ships... the ship models are available freely for any user to print themselves (if they're interested in preparing them), and the financial gain the project would receive at our level of exposure and user traffic would not even come close to compensating the artist for the time taken to prepare the models, much less provide any tangible benefit for the financial situation of the project as a whole.
I'd certainly like a Coronatrix to paint and sit on my desk, but I cannot see this being worthwhile as an "official" product - the nice bit about being open source is that you're just a few clicks away from loading the ship model into a slicer if you want to print one yourself though.
Ultimately, the developers already invest a significant chunk of their personal and sometimes professional time to produce content, features, and fixes, and provide all of the above to you, the users, for free. If defraying the administrative and upkeep costs of the project does not seem like a worthwhile reason to donate, then we have no expectation that users will provide any recompense other than nice words and the occasional useful feedback.
Re: Merch? Amazon link? Other ways to give money than donation.
Out of curiosity I half-prepared and printed the Sino this summer. It took more than a day to do so, and I wouldn't say that the resutls are great. And I'm not to eager to go through it properly, especially with the tiny parts, because it is a lot of work and hassle. And I already have more then enough on my several plates.
Re: Merch? Amazon link? Other ways to give money than donation.
I'd rather not encourage anybody to buy from amazon and alike.