Behind the scenes: Project Work (Patreon)

Since we're a bit in the middle of an awkward moment for stuff to post right now, I figured some of you might enjoy getting some insight on the creative nature and team related stuff for running the project of MA.

Let's jump into it! First off, if you weren't aware of it yet. I go by "Princess Bridget" which is who you're talking to when leaving comments, feedback or reaching out to any of our social accounts labeled as "Messy Studios" on twitter, patreon, pixiv, etc.

I'm the writer and lead creator who manages the team behind the project, so I'll go over some hopefully helpful little mentions or tips maybe about managing a project, team and costs, etc.

~Team Management!~

I'll be honest along the way, that when I first started the planning for Messy Academy. It took many stages to get to where we are currently today! It all began early 2019 when I wanted to display the early draft of the series and lay it out as a comic using 3d models.

I worked on this as a little hobby and updated the comic over time while working a job and just tackling it within a eased free time period. I'm sure there were a very few who enjoyed the comic, but I'm also pretty sure MA wasn't really that known either. (Not that it's very well known now, but much more than it once was! :P)

The main point is that I started this adventure as one person with the comic and 3d models that weren't even 100% created by me, but using source programs and making due with what assets there were to pose and create the screenshots. So with that in mind, anyone out there interested in starting up, just take it nice and slow, enjoy the process of stuff without any pressure and see how things feel.

I knew that personally once the comic was nearing it's end, I wasn't personally happy with it. I wanted to tell the story of Messy Academy, the world setting, the characters who lived there and really just feel as if the story I wanted to tell could be given it's best shot.

That's when I played around with the ideas of looking into making MA into a visual novel, given the nature of the comic layout. It felt like it'd suit the series the best and I think some people could maybe even argue that maybe MA could've been setup as more of a dating sim. (Building stats up, a bit more free movement around the academy and less major story stuff and more focus on just lighter building up of relationships.) Maybe even a rpgmaker style game?

Either way! A normal visual novel seemed like the best course of action to allow the story of MA to work.

When I started progress on MA originally as a visual novel, I still had to make use of 3d assets with the mindset of wanting to replace them with 2d assets in time, which also didn't happen overnight.

The management of the team simply started out with bringing on one person to work alongside with, which is always helpful and then slowly bringing on others one by one. You may not have to work directly with everyone you need skills from, as some people might provide a one time asset and that's all you really needed from them.

Long term or short term, they all get credited for their work towards the project. There are times where managing and getting back to messages from those working for you can be a struggle for time managing, but in time you can break things down to "I'll set an hour aside tops to address messages."

Time yourself and get better at getting back to everyone, maybe lightly chatting a little to see how things are going. Everyone is different with managing things and during the process, you'll most likely end up getting close with those you're working with and consider them friends too!

Team management will vary for everyone working on games or other forms of media, but I wanted to give some insight with our team as a example. I'm not sure how many out there would be interested in starting up their own projects, but I think it's important that those with some experience are open to helping anyone interested.

The more people learning how to pull through and do amazing stuff, the better! Not everyone will agree with that sadly.

~Income & Taxes!~

One thing that I think many want to get from their work on a project is of course income and with your time investment into said project. It's only fair that you'd want to make something out of it, even if it's not enough to live off of it, just something a little extra.

This can easily vary and it's hard to say just how well things might go for any select person. I've seen other creators who start up and within 2-3 months they're earning $3000-4000+ USD per month. While others might very well be bringing in $100 within 2-3 months.

It can fall back on the project idea being advertised, promoted and just how much interest there is. I think within the ab/dl community, which I'd say most of our fans/supporters come from. There's other examples of projects that vary quite a bit and I don't know their full history, so take all of this as it is.

I've seen at least one or two other games within the community that I believe both are ran by artists, either on their own or with the help of a friend or two. Since they're artists firstly, they luckily have the skills to provide character sprites, bg art and cg art if they wish. Which easily cuts out any costs towards having to pay anyone else.

But they could also consider themselves the writer, maybe they also do the programming too? All of these things vary, but I've seen examples where people like the above are bringing in $3000+ per month, which is great! But also everything for income should be really examined. Like the above example, if they're working on their own, then that's at least $2200+ coming in per month for what they do.

They mention to normally set about 15-25% of what you earn aside for taxes, which I'll get into a little later below.

But as you can see, if they're on their own and tackling all of those things. They're putting the work in and because of it, they should be able to roughly live off of what they're doing and put more time into it if they'd like.

It should be noted that the amount of income doesn't always of course come from time invested or how much work is put into things. Let's look at MA's team as a example against the above just to give more insight if it'll be helpful with incomes, what to maybe expect when shooting for the stars. :P

Our team against our example above consists of myself, paying monthly to our engine/editor, sprite artist and cg artist. (This is based on currently, before in our past it would include extra month to month basis commission work or payments.)

Now with that many people, prices will vary but for us personally. The cg art is our most costly payments per month and that's the downside to not having the time or skills of drawing yourself, but not all of us were cut out for drawing. (Myself clearly.) I can easily say that steadily, Messy Studios brings in about $1000-1100 roughly per month.

Not quite that $3000+ target, but that's okay! We make do with what we have! Now if we have a solid $1100 for the month, easily about $600-700 of that can go into cg art based on a number of things. On average we try to shoot for 3 cg scenes per month or per game release update.

The most recent cg scene in the works right now as a example of costs, it's a one full character seen in the scene. Some background seen but not too complex either, with a total of 5 versions that will change the expressions twice or three times, 3-4 perspective bubble effects. This scene costed about $200 based on these things.

Art is a big thing that can vary, you might have better luck with artists who charge much less or even much more. The takeaway is that you'll run into some issues where maybe you pay much less, but perhaps the artist can only do 1 cg scene on average per month.

I'd say choosing the right artist for your project is possibly one of the hardest choices to make, budget wise and visual wise. You might find an artist who is really good at adult scenes, but maybe they can't draw diapers to your liking. Maybe they can draw diapers, but not able to draw males or something else that stands in your way.

Consider everything for your project with the visuals. Moving on though!

Considering our income and the rough example of how much goes into the cg artist. It doesn't leave that much for myself, engine/editor or our sprite artist. Which I think brings us to the tax part!

The hidden factor to keep in mind is taxes, which I would hope many don't like dealing with them, but sadly if you have a job or get some sort of income. Everything gets taxed in one way or another, different countries handle things vastly differently as well.

The most important advice is to remember to set 15-25% of your income aside for taxes, ideally in a non personal account and keep the urge to touch said money away. I won't go into deep details, but I'd like to give an example for how taxes are being handled for MA and some of this will be generally helpful if you're on Patreon as your platform for income.

This is our first year dealing with taxes as we made enough to be flagged for a 1099-K form. I am the one and only one dealing with the taxes situation with the income, I'm sure some of the others on the team are dealing with their own taxes and maybe part of that is from getting paid enough last year from myself to need to file their own 1099-K form.

Personally I will warn you that for myself, I'm sure there's mess ups that I did along the way with how to handle self employment income and taxes. I've heard of people who split their personal bank accounts and start up a company/business bank account, keeping things easier to track for tax season on payments, expenses and what can be deducted.

I've also heard that some people go through their gov to apply their team or creative income as a business or company, allowing for other benefits or down falls maybe. I believe one thing I've read about is that depending on how you wish to handle things, you could very well have to give out w2 forms to others.

You don't have to do this, but I believe there are quite a lot of deeper level tax related things you can pull off if you'd like to. I'd advise talking with a tax professional and maybe explain what you'd like to do ahead of time, even if your project doesn't pan out well income wise, at least you'd have the bases covered.

I can't fully explain my own process for taxes, mainly because I'm still filing and getting everything figured out right now. My advice would be to go to someone in person to handle taxes, but I'm also having issues that dig deeper than what most might be dealing with for other 1099-K filings.

In short, my personal issue is that I'm having a back and forth battle between Patreon and Paypal as Paypal gave me a 1099-K form which double reports what was earned from Patreon. Which in turn makes it look like instead of earning say $8000 for 2020. The IRS sees the other form too and believes I was paid $16,000 possibly.

But if the situation isn't figured out correctly, you're looking at either overpaying or having the IRS get in touch with you to deal with.

Now for example and this is based on using online filing tools to get a rough estimate. If I earned about $14,000-16,000 in 2020 from Patreon and Kickstarter overall. I'm looking at roughly paying in $3000-4000 in taxes that I owe, without deductions or expenses to consider.

With deductions and expenses, based on some decent guessing of costs towards things. I was able to bring that owed amount down to around $1200-1400 range. This too will vary based on where you're from and how your country handles things.

To wrap this section up, I wish I had some more advice or tips in general for income/taxes. I'd love to do a updated tax detailed post in the future after my filings are fully finished and being able to mention some more tips from the tax professionals I'm working with.

~Failure?~

What happens if your project seems to be failing or things aren't panning out as you had wished?

Failure is up to the creator to a degree, even if you're not bringing in enough money to move forward with things on your project. You can still turn things around! MA for example, when I first started up. I took a little bit of my own money out of pocket to cover costs for hiring a sprite artist, it's enough to show some visual progress away from placeholder assets and not as expensive as say, trying to tackle some cg art first.

Even if you put some money into your project out of pocket and things don't seem to be working, maybe take a step back for a moment. Take a look around at other projects and take notes.

Are they advertising their game on certain websites? What kind of little details are they doing to advertise or promote the game? How does their social sites or patreon look? If I was someone looking from the outside of the project, would I want to help fund things?

There's plenty of things to look at and even if it seems like a lot of work, really if you take one step at a time and go at your own pace. You'll pick up on things and slowly in time, apply those things to help improve.

Maybe you'll notice that twitter is a nice place to post once in a while for advertising, perhaps you'll learn the following week that twitter's hashtag system can help spread your posts across certain communities.

Everything you do regardless if it seems to be working or not, is up to you to decide if it's seen as a failure! Some might compare MA to other projects earning much more and see MA as a failure possibly. That's up to people to decide, but what you can do is hold onto hope and push through the struggles.

I personally feel like while I'd love to see MA or our team in general bring in more support, see even more fans and more. I'm also not too bothered if we didn't gain more support and if things roughly stayed steady from here forward.

Would living off of all of this comfortably be nice? Of course! But the main thing is that you should be doing whatever it is you're doing with the project because you personally enjoy doing it. I love seeing the progress and writing everything out for MA, as silly as it seems, seeing how far MA has come since the comic or early days of the visual novel starting up in the Fall 2019 is awesome enough and exciting to me.

Anyways, my post has been a long one and I tend to ramble too much. But I hope some of you awesome folks out there will like this different style of behind the scenes stuff while waiting for some actual behind the scenes for episode 4 writing. Maybe some stuff mentioned might help you with your own project ideas, maybe not and that's okay! ^^

If you've made it this far, then you're a legend! :P