Happy 2023! (Patreon)

Is it just me, or does 2023 sound like the future? 

I hope everyone had a good holiday and got the chance to visit with friends and family with a little time on the side to relax. I did! I've still been doing a decent amount of writing, but in general I spent a lot of time with family and had a chance to recharge for the new year.

Here in California we're getting hit with storms and dealing with flooding and power outages and all that, but it's good because it's helping against the biggest three year drought in several thousand years. So I'm working on my laptop, safe with my battery to keep me from losing work.

But I also got my new desktop! I ordered it for the Black Friday sale and finally got it (long story) and get to play with it... between the power outages. It's the most I've spent on anything besides a car, and it will let me dip my toes into working with better graphics and whatnot. Actually, no, I think I spent more on my laptop... and can definitely say that was worth it.

I'm still working on the games 90% of the time, but as I figure out Daz3D and get decent enough to show off, I have the plans for a short little comic or something to improve my skills.

Last year, my New Years resolutions were to stop being a perfectionist by taking so long to polish everything up. I'll say pretty confidently I did not accomplish this.

Not to say I didn't make a solid effort. I tried my old method, completing things as fast as I could, setting deadlines to motivate myself to put in those 14 hour days with little sleep in order to complete updates... and yet, I still felt the need to edit, to fine tune, to polish things up. And this resulted in continuing to take 3 months for updates instead of my original monthly schedule.

This was frustrating. Both to you, because I kept giving these predictions of "I should have it done in a week or two!" and yet it wasn't finished for a month or two. This happened more often than not, and didn't help anyone. My time estimates were garbage, and it made my predictions absolutely worthless.

Did I actually think I'd have two months of effort finished in a week? Yes, yes I did. How? I took the amount of work I had and said, "yeah, I could knock that out, as long as I give it my full attention." Instead, I went back and reorganized this scene, put this one before that one, realized I needed a whole new path for this choice to make sense, added a new scene here... and ended up with five times the amount of work than I'd predicted.

This resulted in every update I made last year taking two to three times larger than I'd planned it to be. Should I have predicted this, knowing an ending is naturally going to take longer to complete, especially with multiple paths? Yes.

Plus, it was a busy year. My wife and I sat down and said, "it feels like we didn't really go anywhere or do much this year..." and we thought about how much BS there was, and it started to make sense. It was a bad year for sickness, I had covid for over a month. I had family visits, unexpected bathroom renovations (thanks, two leaky toilets causing years of built up black mold) with demolition and construction crews in my house for a solid month, etc. And now I have a shower pan leaking through the ceiling into my kitchen. So... life happens. You can't predict it, but you can allow time for it happen.

What's my solution this year?

I want to focus on two things. The first is to post on here more often. I'm pretty active on Discord, and someone will ask a question about the game. I'll answer it, we'll chat about things, and in the back of my mind, I'll feel like I've notified the masses.

Yet... even if you do follow the Discord, we chat a lot about all sorts of topics. Even if you actively tried to keep up with everything, it gets buried pretty quickly. Plus, it's not a substitute for Patreon, so I'll be making an active effort to post on here weekly.

I tend to get too long winded and leave a wall of text, when I could be popping in with a few paragraphs about what I accomplished the previous week.

Plus, I also want to make an effort to post everything here first. Comics, stories, renders, etc. The next chapter of Jazz, for example. Lately I've been often putting things up on Discord first in order to get feedback, but I need to remember that not everything here has to be perfect, nor permanent.

Some solid advice I saw recently in putting out content more often is to always think of it as a work in progress. When you think of it as a the final product you're far more likely to keep working on it, and you lose sight of when it's already "good enough".

I can't seem to control how long things take, but I can control how much I keep you guys updated. So I'm going to make the effort to keep weekly updates on progress for what I'm currently working on along with previews, new renders, and whatever side content I have to show off.

The other thing I want to change is the length of updates. Since they have been getting larger and are subsequently taking longer, I plan to release smaller updates more often. Perhaps something like every other month instead of taking three.

So, in short, my new years resolution is... to post on here more! I want to keep you guys updated on what I'm working on, along with the progress trackers and preview content.

I tend to get focused on finishing an update and let the progress posts lapse, yet I need to remember I don't need to write an essay or get too deep into things and can sometimes just post a few paragraphs. Smaller updates more often!

Now, before I end this post, the main thing I want to say here is:

Thank you.

Whether you've been supporting me only recently or for years, the gift of having you believe in me is incredible, and I can't thank you enough.

I'm starting this year with a smile on my face knowing there are people out there who enjoy my content enough to send a few bucks my way.

I appreciate you!

And I hope we all have a great year.