Feature Bounty System Manual

The Feature Bounty System is a crowdfunded development as a service platform designed to provide additional features to GearCity and future projects.

1) Contributions

Everyone is welcome to contribute funds via approved contribution methods. Currently, we only support Patreon. One-time donation systems via Paypal are coming soon. And we will explore other options in the future.

Contributors receive one vote point per dollar they donate and access to the current Feature Bounty DLC being worked on. Contributors will also be put into the benefactor group on the forums and allowed to post in Feature Bounty System forums. Votes are consumable when you vote. When you vote, you lose the same number of voting points as you voted. Additional perks may also be paid for. Some of these may not be retroactive based on your past contributions. We reserve the right to alter these rules as needed.

Billing for reoccurring contributions occurs on the first of the month. We will calculate the contributor's voting points within one week. One-time contributions are also calculated in the first week of the month. We reserve the right to postpone these calculations until a milestone vote if necessary. Keys for DLC are distributed after first billing. We reserve the right to change these rules as needed. (If we can work out an automatic system to send the DLC keys out, we will bill and send those out immediately.)

Visual Entertainment and Technologies LLC reserves the right to ban anyone for any reason. Contributions are non-refundable. Contribute at your own risk.

2) Milestone Goal

The Feature Bounty System requires the community to raise a certain amount of money, called the Milestone. All contributions are pooled together into the Milestone Fund. When the Milestone Funding reaches or exceeds the Milestone Goal, I will call a vote. Work on the next update will only begin after the Milestone goal is met, voting has concluded, and I have approved the result of the vote.

The community has 12-months to raise funds to reach a Milestone Goal. If the community can not raise enough funds after 12 months, Visual Entertainment and Technologies will fund the lesser of $5,000 or until the Milestone Goal is met. The community and Visual Entertainment and Technologies will then vote on that Milestone. After voting and approval, we will shut the Feature Bounty System down.

Visual Entertainment and Technologies LLC does not guarantee any work funded by the Feature Bounty System. Nor does it guarantee any timeline. Money contributed is non-refundable, so donate at your own risk. If the community funds an additional Milestone faster than we release an update for the previous Milestone, we will pause Feature Bounty System contributions until we catch up.

We will update the Milestone Funds in the first week of every month, but we reserve the right to postpone fund updates if necessary.

As the Feature Bounty System progresses, the Milestone Goals will increase. Visual Entertainment And Technologies reserves the right to alter Milestone Goals, bounties, and the rules and regulations on this page.

3) Meeting The Milestone

When the Milestone Funding reaches or exceeds the Milestone Goal, I will call a vote. This should occur around the second week of the month. But it might happen sooner. As mentioned previously, billing for reoccurring contributions happens on the first of the month, and our funds should be updated within the first week of the month.

If voting extends past the next billing and fund update cycle, contributions will be applied to the next Milestone Goal. In this event, the distribution of new voting points will not occur until after voting for the last Milestone has been completed. Visual Entertainment and Technologies, LLC reserve the right to change that if necessary.

4) Voting Process

After we meet a Milestone Goal, we will call the voting process. Voting currently takes place in the Milestone Voting sub-forum in the Feature Bounty System section of the official forums. Voting will take place in a specific thread in that forum. Voters will choose which item to fund from a list of votable bounties. These bounties can be found on the Milestone Bounties forum or the bounty list page.

To make a vote, contributors will post a reply in the Milestone Voting thread. The replies must contain the number or name of the bounty you are voting for and the number of voting points you are spending. You may vote for more than one bounty, and you may cast more than one vote. However, please keep all your votes in the same reply. You may edit your votes up until voting is closed. After which, you will not be able to edit or delete your votes. Upon closure of the vote, every vote cast removes a voting point from the contributor. The only way to gain voting points is to contribute more money.

Every Milestone Vote will require funding of one major artwork-related item. And no more than one major artwork-related item can be funded in a Milestone unless otherwise noted. You can find these items in the Artwork Bounties forum and on the Bounties' page.

Voting is open for two weeks. At the end of voting, I tally up the results and deduct voting points from the voters. If you cast more votes than you have voting points, we will disregard the bottom-most listed votes until your votes cast matches your votes points.

Any item with more votes than the dollar bounty is automatically funded. We will deduct the bounties of those items from the Milestone Funds. We will deduct automatically approved bounties from the most to least expensive. We then look at the Artwork item with the most votes and subtract its bounty from the Milestone Funds. Next, we look at the item with the most votes. If there is enough milestone funding, we subtract that bounty from the Milestone Funds.

We continue to check each item in the order of total votes, from most to least. If there are not enough Milestone Funds to cover the bounty, we skip that item and continue to the next item. This process continues until there are not enough Milestone Funds to cover any bounty with at least 2% of votes. When this occurs, the Milestone Voting Process is complete. We will roll over any excess Milestone Funds to the next Milestone Goal.

You may cast anonymous votes through private messaging. We include instructions on the Milestone Voting forum. In the future, we may switch to a dedicated voting platform. This depends on the number of contributors that join and the frequency we reach Milestone goals.

5) Update And Next Milestone

After voting is closed, Visual Entertainment and Technologies LLC will begin work on the feature update. We will distribute the update via our feature bounty DLC on Steam. There is no guarantee that we will complete the update, and we imply no deadline date for its release. We will return the bounty for any item we feel we can not complete to the Milestone Funds for the next Milestone Goal, but we will not be refund or restor voting points cast for the uncompleted item.

Fundraising for the next Milestone Goal happens immediately. However, we will not begin voting on Milestones items until we complete and release the previous Milestone update. We will pause fundraising if we fall two milestones behind.

In the case of delayed artwork items, we may release updates without the funded artwork. We will still consider this a completed milestone, with the proviso that we will add the artwork at a later date. If we have not completed the artwork in 12 months, the artwork bounties will return to the Milestone Funds per the uncompleted items policy above. If this situation occurs, fundraising for artwork-related items will end.