February Update (Patreon)

Here we are again with the Weekend Update!

...on a weekday.

Causing me to ask myself, why do I suck at doing things in a timely manner, and how can I improve that?

It's a constant question I struggle with, and something I'll dive into later in this post.

But first, let me get to the actual news and updates from the past couple weeks.

What did I accomplish?

Finished with the little updates to the girls for Leah's Birthday scene. Thanks for the feedback with Jenn. The combination of finding a hairstyle that parts on the same side and giving her back her glasses makes her more recognizable with her hair down, would you agree?

This wasn't all I was focusing on at that time, but was one of the more fun parts. I also worked on polishing the final scenes of the update with dialogue and continued working on the visuals and animations. There are a lot of other quick additions, like making Grace's subplot more optional as intended, more transitions, and more renders for the quick montage in Korea.

I also focused on fleshing out character interactions and dynamics which were hinted at before but deserved more attention.

Adding competition was a big factor. This ending has been building towards that, with the MC trying to take a backseat to avoid pressuring the girls to do anything they'd regret and blame him for. 

So that's all coming along nicely. As usual, I wish (and had hoped) this was all finished several weeks ago. That's something I'm still working to improve on, and I found a few ways I'm excited about that I'll get into now. 

It's not directly game-related, so if you're already bored with this post, feel free to consider it finished!

But if you're an aspiring writer, developer, or have some kind of creative project you're struggling to get off the ground, you might find the following useful.

On continued attempts to improve efficiency:

"It's a new year! Time to do better than the last!"

Sounds great. But positivity isn't enough. Optimism doesn't always work. I needed a plan.

So I found one I hadn't heard about called the Pomodoro method. 

You're either saying, "ah, yes," or "what's that?"

It's a simple method a dude developed when trying to improve his studies. He took a kitchen timer shaped like a tomato (or pomodoro in Italian) and set it for 25 minutes, telling himself he'd focus on nothing else for that time.

When the time is up, take a five minute break. Go do some pushups, check your phone, let yourself relax. But time the break too so you don't get too distracted. Repeat. Do this four times, then give yourself a fifteen minute break to celebrate.

Not only is it supposed to help your focus by putting your phone away and ignoring it for a time, but you also learn to schedule each block of time for a task, giving yourself a better idea of how long the total task will take by breaking it down into small ones.

Simple, right?

Yep. But that's the beauty because I hate schedules and time restraints and all of that. I don't use a damn calendar. That's just boxes meant to constrain me!

But no. I'm the only one who can put my phone away for fifteen minutes and acknowledge that there's nothing on my Discord that can't wait 25 minutes. 

So, despite trying this out, why am I posting my weekend update the following Tuesday?

I wrote three different ones. And didn't post them. This is great in a way because now I have content for the next month I don't have to worry about writing. But it's not great because I missed an easy deadline.

How did I miss it? Ironically, I was trying to automate better.

This is a constant question I find when I'm attempting something new. I realize I might be able to improve my efficiency, but it takes time to stop and do that. Taking a class, learning a skill, all takes time. But it can save a ton of time in the long run. This is what I attempted over the weekend.

Something I've improved on in the past year is social media and consistent posts. The Expanding Universe Games Twitter account has grown from a couple hundred to almost two thousand followers, Ashley's has over 400, Instagram has two fifty, DeviantArt passed a hundred. However, there's a time cost to this. As much as it's nice to build a bigger following with consistent updates and posts, it takes time out of the day.

Still, there's other benefits. Mainly, it's a social outlet. Working from home means I don't have coworkers, and although my girl is a lot of fun, chatting on Discord, developer forums and the like can be a welcome relief, like catching up with coworkers.

But at the same time... social media sucks. 

I'd read about a few different automatic posting scheduling apps. Post to multiple accounts at the same time? Sounds like a time saver!

So over the weekend I researched a few. Nothing can do all the accounts I have now, but I found some that do the big ones. Some have two week trials, some are free. So I try the free one with the most features.

It does auto posts for Instagram, twitter, facebook, tiktok. I don't have a Facebook or tiktok, but what the hell, posting a picture once instead of repeatedly still sounds like a good time saver. And if I can do that, perhaps that will create an audience on the other platforms, I tell myself.

I sign up. It turns out Instagram can't work with the program without a facebook account. Fine. I create one. Says I need a phone number. I'm not using mine, obviously. I google it. Random phone number for expressly this purpose? Nope, facebook recognizes it. A new number on google voice? There we go. 

Nope, it doesn't like me using Ashley's picture. Need a real person. I scroll through my phone for something. A few days later, success. Meanwhile, I start a tiktok account. I know nothing about it, but a few other devs recommended it. Except, tiktok only does videos. What, no pictures or text at all? Fucking pointless.

Aha, finally. Now I can make a post across the board!

Except... it turns out I was misled by all the articles I read. You can post to all the different accounts from one app, sure. But you still have to post them one at a time. Wait, so this whole endeavor was pointless, because you can't press one button to post across the board, as advertised? Apparently not. Sure, you can schedule posts, but you can already do that on the individual fuckin' sites.

So I look it up. Apparently, you can post to Instagram and have it linked to also post on your facebook, tumblr, twitter and tiktok all at once. Cool! 

So I post to all the accounts... with hashtags to attract all the #adultgamers and #3dgirls lovers. Also some #breastexpansion tags! That always gets 50 likes on Instagram...

Nope. Zero likes on tumblr (why did I make a tumblr when it's basically dead since they went to war against nipples? Apparently I already had an account I'd forgotten about). Zero views on stupid tiktok once I finally uploaded a few videos. Zero views on facebook, all after four posts across four days.

What a terrible way to waste a weekend.

How much time did I save? Riiiight. I can still schedule tweets, as before. Instead of being able to blow up the internet with one button, I'm still stuck with a deviantart page, a slushe page, a twitter, Instagram and reddit account, and about five other forums and sites to upload the game to whenever I have an update.

I used to take one day a month to do marketing. Now it's hours out of my day. Tried to automate it all, but it's apparently not possible, even in 2022. Fuck it. I'm over it. 

I share this with you partially to vent, partially to let you know what I was up to this week. And why, although I started this post on Saturday, I'm only finishing it now.

Still, did I learn anything?

Kind of. The top priority is still all you fine people on here. And Patreon lets me schedule posts. So I'm going to take advantage.

Instead of scrambling to come up with posts consistently, I'm going to plan them out for the month. So I don't post my weekend update on a Tuesday. 

Same with Twitter, same with Instagram. I'll take one day a week to schedule a few posts throughout the week. But it won't be a whole day, it'll only be 25 minutes. Yeah, pomodoro method!

I'll be scheduling everything to avoid that feeling of "what am I missing?" which can take me down a rabbit hole of researching something unrelated or all the other trappings of the ol' internet.

It's frustrating when I spend 12 hours a day, 7 days a week working and still have months pass between updates. There's a thousand things I can be doing with running a game studio, and a hundred things that need to be done. But there's only me doing them all, so I need to protect my time better and make sure that I'm working on the one damn thing that matters the most: the games.

What's the schedule look like, now that I'm still working on finishing Hypnosis? It looks like that will push things back a month, leaving us with the update along with a story this month and I'll finish up Endowed in March, hopefully early enough to leave time to start up on Hypnosis again.

On a different note:

Thanks for the feedback with the last poll on what kind of content I should share from other creators. The majority of you said you'd rather your content be at least adjacent to your fetishes, so I'll look to other creators who do expansion themed content specifically. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot that do games (which was the reason for the poll) but there are a few who do comics and stories.

There's also a handful of people from here I want to share with you who like to hang out in the Discord channel, so I'll make a post about that later this month.

Thanks, everyone!