Here’s some fanart from Brobot_1.
In other exciting news, hi I’m Ronja and I’ll be taking over some of Matt’s social media posting – mostly just fanart for now. You might know me from earlier fanart that I’ve done, armour concepts for EBF5, the art for 7th Heaven, and most recently as the person replying to your bug reports and messages. I’m also Matt’s girlfriend, secretary, cook, maid, and butler. In my spare time I am a part-time artist and full-time plant mum.
(THIS COMPETITION IS NOW OVER)
Hey guys, I’m still keeping half an eye on bug reports, but for the most part I’ve already started my holidays, and I’m gaming most of the day.
Every year I do a Christmas giveaway, where I ask people to leave comments on this website for a chance to win Steam keys. This year I don’t feel like reading comments for a whole day, so please keep your comment to one sentence! The prizes this time are obviously keys for Epic Battle Fantasy 5!
Rules:
• Leave a short, one-sentence comment below.
• The comment must be unique.
• Make sure to fill in the email field so I can email you if you win.
• Winners will be emailed on the 23rd!
Hey guys, Epic Battle Fantasy 5 now has a “Coming Soon” Steam page!
Please follow the game and add it to your wish-list, so it gets ranked above other stuff. (and obviously buy and review it when it comes out!) EBF5 will *probably* release on Steam first, for $15, with the free web version coming a few weeks later. The steam version adds about 33% more content, in the form of super hard optional dungeons, which includes the evil player battles.
In other news, the EBF Discord server now has new creative channels, including: Misc Art, Lego, and Minecraft. The EBF-Fanart channel has been quite popular so far, so if you’re a creative person and want to chat with others about stuff you’ve made, check it out.
Hey guys, the Christmas Steam key giveaway is over and I’ve sent out 40 game keys by email!
The entry requirement for the giveaway was telling me a bit about your gaming life.
I got nearly 400 entries and a lot of stories. It was nice to see that many people got into gaming playing the sorts of games I played when I was younger: Zelda and Pokemon on Nintendo consoles, Heroes of Might and Magic and Age of Empires on PC, Final Fantasy games on PS1, old stuff on emulators, free MMO games like Maple Story, and a lot of Flash games too (though I still haven’t played Mardek). I was also reminded to play Doki Doki, Hollow Knight, Cuphead, and LISA. These games are on my radar, but as always it’s just a case of playing through everything else first.
I was mildly annoyed by how popular rogue-likes were though! I think games like Binding of Isaac, Dead Cells and Enter the Gungeon would have been better off with actual designed levels instead of randomly generated ones that you were forced to replay over and over. I guess some people like their nearly endless games. But I guess I am slightly out of touch these days, as I’ve not played Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, Overwatch or PUBG.
A few people mentioned that EBF4 was the first game they played on Steam, and got them into downloadable games. Most people were very long-time fans, but there were a few that just recently played my games for the first time. Apparently quite a few people have tried playing the EBF games co-op with a friend, with each person controlling a different character in battle. This is weird, but it’s also the sort of thing I might have tried when I was younger.
Anyway, thanks for all the holiday wishes and hope you’re all having a good time!
Here’s a guy I made:
(This competition is now over!)
Hey guys, it’s time for my 3rd Christmas giveaway!
I’m giving away free Steam keys for Epic Battle Fantasy 4 and Bullet Heaven 2.
If you’re interested, leave a comment about what sorts of games you play and about your gaming life in general.
How winners are chosen will continue to be a secret, but honesty is quite important. You should also mention which of the two games you want.
Make sure to fill in the email field correctly so I can email you the prize if you win.
Last year I got 531 entries and… I can’t remember how many games I gave out.
But your chances of winning are decent. The more people that enter, the more I’ll give out, so get your friends involved!
As usual I’ll be busy around Christmas, so the giveaway will end a few days after.
Probably on the 27th, so you have until then!
Hey guys, I’ve just set up a Patreon two months ago and I’m already feeling very sheepish about using the service. They’re planning to put up their fees soon, which works out very poorly for people pledging many small amounts. Previously the fee was taken from all of your pledges put together (the whole point of a service like this), but now it’ll cost 0.35c for each individual pledge. Meaning if you support many Patreons for $1, you’ll essentially be charged over 35% in fees, which is absurdly high. Patreon’s been very brazen about this change, hiding it behind the fact that creators will get more money overall (assuming that many patrons don’t just outright leave). Patreon’s facade of being in it to support the little guy is becoming very hard to believe, especially with these dishonest PR statements that don’t address the actual reasons for these changes.
There’s a lot of anger over this, but if this change goes through, I’ll have to delete my $1 tier and tell people not to waste their money. At that point Steam and Kongregate take a smaller cut, and they actually earn it by giving me lots of traffic, while Patreon does fuck all besides process payments. People who were on the $1 tier will still get all of the perks, but in future those perks will be on the $4 tier instead.
It’s not that I don’t want your $1, it’s just that we’re both better off if you save it and buy my games on Steam or Kongregate instead. Charging you guys $1.35 to send me $1 is pointless.
Also I still think Patreon’s new logo is ugly as hell.
Thoughts?
Alright! My Patreon is done!
For $1 a month you can get a lot of perks, so check it out.
I’ll try to not sit here refreshing it every 5 minutes…
Hey guys, I recently took down all ads off this website and closed my Google AdSense account in protest against Google and the ad model in general. I only made a few hundred dollars per year off ads, so it’s not a massive sacrifice, but I feel like I’m doing my part.
Lately I’ve strongly felt that the ad model is doing serious harm to the content that is produced on the internet. It encourages safe, mainstream click-bait instead of high-quality, honest content. Some examples include:
• YouTube is de-monitizing any videos that could be considered controversial to appease advertisers, including video-game violence, swearing, and discussions about the news or politics. A lot of videos are also flagged falsely. For example a video providing help for suicidal people would be flagged as controversial as it’s related to a controversial topic. I’ve noticed that even harmless fail videos are censoring swearing. This is a bad direction to be going if you want a diversity of content to be produced (which I’m assuming YouTube is no longer interested in, despite this being a major advantage it had over TV).
• News websites are printing any garbage that will get clicks. They produce the most addictive headlines and site layouts, keep users outraged over petty nonsense, and do whatever it takes to keep users on the site longer to see more ads. I feel like this is doing major harm to public discourse as the most outrageous articles will always get the most exposure.
• Many ads are just outright scams or otherwise malicious. There’s obviously no quality control going on when ad space is being purchased. I often see ads like “Get Minecraft for free!” or “Try this new bullshit health supplement!” and other obvious scams. I’m assuming these are effective otherwise they wouldn’t be appearing.
So my recommendation would be to use an Ad Blocker (like uBlock Origin) for your own safety, but also to discourage platforms like YouTube and Facebook from bending over to the demands of advertisers. F.B. Purity is also a good chrome extension to block most of the garbage on Facebook.
If you can afford it, throwing a few dollars at your favourite creators on Patreon will do them more good than watching hundreds of ads will. Free stuff is great, but I feel like a couple of dollars isn’t a high price to fight back against the harm that ads are doing – and also to save you the time wasted on them.
And a final note: Short, high-quality content in particular doesn’t do well under the ad model. Stuff like animation or well-researched videos. Those don’t get a lot of clicks relative to the amount of work put into them, and it’s most important to support the creators of works like these through donations.
That is all. Thoughts?
I made a Discord server cause a few people asked me to for some reason. Here it is. I have no idea what I’m doing.
Come chat or something.
Hey guys, I had some problems with the website over the last few days. The site went down for a bit, and the database was frozen for a while. If you couldn’t comment, then that’s why.
Everything should be fine now though.
For those curious about the details, a wordpress plugin that I don’t even use anymore filled up the website database, and my hosting provider froze it. Whoops. :/
