September Stuff (Patreon)

Hello everyone! It's the first of September, so... time for the regular beginning of the month post!

I actually have some fairly important stuff that I'd like to talk about. Most of the time this ends up just being a bit of a ramble and a rough idea of things that are coming in the next thirty days or so but this month I do have an announcement or two to make.

With that said, then, I'll crack into things and try to keep the rambling to a minimum. The important stuff is going to be toward the beginning of the post whereas the less important stuff is going to be toward the end. Sounds good? Sounds good.

A Tiny Furry In A Huge World Plus

First of all I'd like to get an extremely positive announcement out of the way. I said back when I announced this thing that I intended to be transparent with sales numbers, so...

A Tiny Furry In A Huge World Plus has sold a little over 400 copies as of the time of writing - or, 400 copies in the month or so that it's been since I launched it. For a AAA game publisher 400 copies wouldn't mean anything but for a solo developer releasing a text adventure, you know, that's absolutely fabulous. We were even in the top four sellers on itch.io at launch. To say that it was a huge success is an understatement.

The gross profit from this was $2048. But wait - I don't get $2048 dollars. Itch.io and PayPal take 10% each from this figure - so after their cut ($200ish dollars each), it's about $1648. Then the IRS - or the tax people - will be taking a chunk out of this. It's hard for me to calculate the exact amount here because I won't know for sure until I file my taxes but they'll be taking about 30% roughly. This equates to about $500 when all is said and done. 

So all in all, after everything, I made about $1100 on launch month. Unfortunately, I can't give an exact figure on this until the end of the year - so the next time I talk about profits will be the end of the tax year because then I can give numbers rather than guesstimates.

It's important to note - for myself more than anything - that the game will not sell this amount every month. This was launch month. It's unlikely that it'll ever sell 400 copies in a month ever again. I am not sure how much it will sell on a monthly basis but right now it's selling anywhere between 1-6 copies a day. This is another reason why I'll probably leave another report on it until the end of the tax year. To guess future sales figures would be me guessing and it's clear that I'm bad at guessing these things by now.

Anyway. Speaking of being bad at guessing - at my most lofty expectations I'd figure it'd turn out a hundred or so copies in launch month before ultimately petering out. As a result, my plan was to release it, let it sit on itch.io for a while, and then roll out a token update every few months or so - in particular, I was aiming to have v1.1 by the end of the year. Since it's sold a fair bit more that, my plans have changed, however.

I would like to try and get A Tiny Furry In A Huge World Plus v1.1 finished by the end of this month rather than the end of the year as I originally planned. Then I want to be working to get v1.2 ready by the end of the year so that I can start developing something for v1.3 by 2023.

I will go into the reasons for this shortly - but before I do, I'd like to point out that these updates will have a month of Patreon exclusivity before launching on itch.io. So if v1.1 launches on September 31st (which it probably will) I won't upload it onto itch.io until October 31st. The reason for this is twofold - first, I'd like my Patreons to have an incentive - and, second, doing it like this will let me have some time to polish out any bugs or weird stuff.

There will also be once-a-month preview builds for the game going forward until at least the end of the year.

Anyway - here are the reasons why I'm speeding up development on Plus a bit.

1. Strike while the iron is hot. There is a fair amount of attention around the product right now. It just released, people are really happy with what they paid for, and there's a fair bit of buzz around it. Releasing a hearty update swiftly will give people a lot of faith in the product's immediate future - and that's faith that I want them to have.

2. I want to thank everyone for supporting the product as much as they have. People came out in droves to buy it. I want to give them an update as a thank you. This one is pretty simple, but, very important.

3. I want to polish the product completely. There are a few bugs in v1.0 that aren't anything major - but are a little annoying. This can be anything from minor visual bugs to typos to other such nonsense. These aren't game breaking or even really noticeable but they do annoy me and I'd like to get rid of them all (or most) ASAP.

That's about it for this part of the post. The too long didn't read is that I made a little over a grand during Plus' launch month - and that I will be doing a couple of significant updates for the game before the end of the year.

A Tiny Furry On A Huge Quest

So - with the above in mind and a bunch of other factors that I am about to go into - I am going to be altering how I handle releasing preview builds for A Tiny Furry On A Huge Quest.

For the past little bit (since the announcement I was developing it, really) I've been endeavoring to post a preview build for this game at least once per month. To make this as simple as possible - I will not be releasing monthly updates for this game anymore.

Now, don't panic. 

This does not mean that I am not actively developing this game. 

This does not mean that I am going to be working on the game less. 

This definitely does not mean that the project is abandoned.

I will be putting as many hours as I have been into this games development on a monthly basis - if not more.

I will be working on this game as much as I always have been - if not more.

I am still aiming to have the project finished around the end of the year/the beginning of 2023.

What this means is that I'd like to stop drip feeding this game to people and actually launch significantly large updates for it. The past two updates have added one new area and a couple of endings each. And while this is fine and good, I'd like updates to add several new areas and lots of endings and lots of neat things to explore and play around with - because that's what A Tiny Furry On A Huge Quest is all about.

So, with that in mind, I will be polling the final area to be added to the prologue this month. I will be actively developing The Forge and what's left of the basement content. Next month, I will work on adding the final areas to the prologue and making all the various voreish and non-voreish side quests that I have planned actually accessible and feature complete. I will then release this in early November. The game will then be very close to being complete - it'll simply be a case of rounding out the endings already on offer in the tavern and maybe adding a new character there or something. While I work on this, I will be releasing plaintext endings/content for those who are interested in that as teases, I guess.

This will result in a huge preview build that has lots and lots to explore. New characters, plenty of new endings, and tons of possibilities. It'll be like a whole new game, even - and much less piecemeal than the last two updates have been. This properly reflects my vision of what I want A Tiny Furry On A Huge Quest to be. This will be a much more exciting and satisfying thing for me to release - and, hopefully, it'll result in a much more exciting and satisfying preview product for you all to play.

If I release the game like this - then by my best estimates, the whole thing should be done in two updates. The game will have all of it's areas, plot elements, and the vast majority of it's endings. I will definitely be doing some commissioned bonus content for it after this, though. I am not sure I will handle the release of this - things might go back to monthly - but we'll see after these last two big updates are out and the game is (mostly) done.

In the mean time, I will providing significant updates to A Tiny Furry In A Huge World Plus. New endings, new areas, new characters, all new kinds of things.

I hope that this isn't disappointing to anyone. Again, I will stress - I am working on this project just as much as I always have been. 

In terms of significant and important announcements, these were the two that I really wanted to get out of the way. From here on out it's just the usual stuff. So, to summarize the two things...

A Tiny Furry In A Huge World Plus will be getting a monthly preview build every month going forward until at least the end of the month. Some months - likely every two or three - I'll be releasing a really huge update for A Tiny Furry On A Huge Quest until it's completed. I hope that's okay.

It's been a long post already, so I'm going to do my best to keep the next few sections briefish.

Commissions

Due to that whole Covid business last month I wasn't really able to catch up on commissions as much as I wanted to, so, I'll be making sure that I prioritize these this month since I really want to clear my backlog.

I don't want to get ahead of myself and say how many I'll have out, but, expect at least two really big stories. I am aiming to do more than this - three or four, maybe - but we'll see how things go because there's a lot of things I need to work on. 

I don't have solid dates for when you'll see 'em, but, do expect them this month! I'll give ETAs when I'm closer to publishing.

As for vignettes...

Vignettes

I am a little behind on vignettes due to the whole Covid-19 thing. Luckily since these are short stories by nature it won't take me very long to catch up on them. I'll be spending the first few days of the month doing this, so expect a couple of these over the next few days. I should have my first one out before the weekend - and another one or two next week.

Health

I don't have Covid anymore, so, that's good! Physically speaking I am great. Mentally speaking I am definitely feeling annoyed that I got about two weeks robbed from me by sickness that I really would've liked to spend writing but I'm going to do my best to not let it get to me too much. Last month I had a lot of successes and victories - so I am going to do my best to focus on those.

That's it! Thank you for reading - thank you for another month of glorious support - and I'll see you all with a juicy vignette in a day or two!