- Yes
- No
0 voters
Would you be interested in pre-ordering Skatter v2 via a crowd-funding campaign?
In summary:
- I work full-time on our products, Skatter and Transmutr, but my time is split between user support and development
- Merwan joined me to develop Skatter v2 but he can only work part-time as we do not produce enough revenue to support us both
- Skatter v2 made great progress but there’s still a lot of work left to do
- A crowd-funding campaign would allow us both to work full-time on Skatter v2 and to release it within a reasonable timeframe
- Through the campaign, you would pre-order a full Skatter v2 license (or an upgrade if you have a v1 license), and be involved in the development
- Please tell us what you think of this idea!
The details:
Skatter v1 was released in February 2016. It had several updates, and in 2017 I started working on version 2 which would bring big new features like clusters, bitmap masks, a new browser, LODs, and more. I quickly realized that I needed help, as I wasn’t making progress fast enough on my own. So I offered Merwan to join me, which he did but only part-time as our company doesn’t make enough money to support us both full-time. For this reason, I continued to take rendering commissions on a regular basis, and Merwan had to keep another full-time job.
We made a lot of progress since then. Merwan brought his huge technical knowledge to the table, and we pretty much rewrote Skatter from scratch. It’s now much faster, more stable, and it has great foundations to support all the new features that we’re developing. For reasons that we already explained in a previous post, we also made the decision to accompany Skatter v2 with two complementary projects: Transmutr and a marketplace that will be integrated into the new Skatter browser.
Several months ago, I decided to stop doing rendering commissions and to work full-time on our software projects. Transmutr has now seen the light of day, and we are going back to Skatter v2 and the marketplace. But there is still a lot to do, and we feel that Skatter v2 is still far from being ready for a public release. This is all very frustrating for both you and us, as we all want to see Skatter v2 being released!
We think that if Merwan could work full-time with me, development would be significantly faster. So we are trying to make a plan to do just that, without going broke (which would force us to take other jobs again, and we would be back to square one).
That’s where you guys come in. We thought about opening pre-orders for Skatter v2. We will estimate how much time we need to finish the first release of Skatter v2 (probably a few months), which will define how much money we need to raise through the crowd-funding campaign. Once funds are secured, Merwan could quit his job and go full-time on Skatter v2.
On top of getting a full Skatter v2 license, we have a few ideas to reward early-adopters: providing access to alpha and beta releases for instance, and allowing backers to vote on which features to prioritize. In short, we want our community to have a direct influence on the development of Skatter v2.
What do you guys think? Is this a crazy idea, or do you think this is feasible?
But the idea of getting help from users sponsoring specific features sure is interesting. Maybe in the future but not for now.
