[Announcement] Paid Episodes Are Live!

Today, we're releasing the first paid content for Veiled Age. This is intentionally a stealth release. That means, aside from my writer friends, you all reading this get to be the first to kick the tires.

Here's how it works. Veiled Age is meant to be episodic. The Prologue will always be free. For now, Secret of Gloam Lake will continue to be free as well. For $8, you'll get two more stories:

• Intermission: For Whom the Chime Rings

• Episode 2: Dwellers of Bodenforst

These are described in a little more detail on the new homepage. Together, these new stories add over 50,000 words and something like 6-10 hours of entertainment on the first playthrough. The purchase is associated with your account, not the character, meaning you can run through it as many times as you like if you want to see different outcomes.

That's our intended structure going forward: episodes for sale after they're actually written. No ads, no subscriptions, no fake currencies, or other annoying BS. Think of it like buying little paperback novellas that just happen to form an interconnected browser game.

On the Campaign Screen, you’ll see both new stories, with a button to purchase. The Campaign screen appears after the prologue and between episodes. So if you’re starting a new game, you’ll need to play through the prologue first. Then you’ll see this:

Buying from a small website doesn’t have to be scary. We’re using Stripe as the payment processor, which is a very common standard across the internet. Everything’s encrypted and we never see your credit card number. The payment screen looks like this, with slight differences depending on your country and device.

Okay, that's the news. I’m pretty happy about it, but if you knew me in person, you'd know it's physically impossible for me to maintain a hype-generating marketing persona for more than about 5 seconds. So can we just talk?

Unrefined, yet fun.

It's only fair to warn you about something. It's not my style to keep creative work private until it's perfect. I won't lie, there are still bugs, editing mistakes, continuity errors, and maybe even some bad writing here and there.

If you're like me, you have mixed feelings about Beta software and early access games. It's fun to get into something early and help shape the product. But it also means accepting a certain amount of jank. So it's natural that we sometimes pine for the old days when games reached their final form before they were sealed in a box and shipped. This is just how it had to be. Your Nintendo cartridges weren’t going to be updated over the internet — a lot of us didn’t even have home internet.

But we do live in an internet world now, and Veiled Age was conceived around that from the beginning. Before I even thought of it as a game, I always wondered: what would a novel for the internet age look like? For one thing, I could quietly rewrite weak scenes or fix plot holes when they come to light, just like fixing any other bug in a web app. But beyond that, it could be a platform for my future creative impulses and experiments. In that sense, I'm more concerned with sustaining the project than polishing it to perfection. It's meant to be a living thing, and as such, it will probably never be free of quirks and imperfections.

Up until now, it has not been possible to give us any money for Veiled Age. We don't have a Patreon, a Kickstarter or even a tip jar. If I can help it, I prefer not to take money on the promise to build something later. My creative process can be slow and meandering, and when people pay for something in advance, I feel more rushed than I'd like.

We're releasing paid content now because it's reached the point where we have multiple episodes that are relatively story-complete, and I can see that testers are enjoying themselves for several hours. In other words, if you are the kind of person to follow this project in the first place, I think you will have fun with it as it is, without relying on promises about the future.

The Importance of Real Customers for Creatives

I come from the web development world, having been the UX Director of a mildly successful startup company that was later acquired. When you're trying to get a web app off the ground, you don't spend 10 years in a basement building a masterpiece. You get it into peoples' hands as soon as possible. Let them have fun with it, let them break it by doing things you didn't think of. And, perhaps more importantly, let them buy it.

You might think it's important to get paying users early on just because they help cover your costs. True enough. But what's more valuable is that they were willing to open their wallet at all. They've given a clear signal they believe in what you're trying to do, so you know exactly who to talk to when you're looking for ideas on how to improve your work. Their opinions are a lot more valuable than randos on reddit.

Good feedback is doubly important because Veiled Age is very much an experimental writing medium for me. Sure, other text-heavy, choose-your-own-adventure games exist, but I really haven’t encountered much out there that I feel has similar priorities in terms of what it’s trying to be. So whether you ever buy anything or not, thanks for being our guinea pig.

Come to forums.veiledage.com to discuss.