Plans for 2020 (Patreon)

Hello! It's the beginning of the new year.

I like to commit to goals (yearly, monthly, weekly-- even daily). I've found that this helps my productivity incredibly. Spelling out goals, working towards them, and revising them when necessary-- that's a major part of my work-flow. I think that it's one of the reasons why the past few years with this patreon have been successful.

The previous major post like this was the mid-year roadmap update that I posted last summer.

In that post, I looked at the goals I had originally planned for 2019, evaluated my progress, and revised some of them. Today, I want to do very briefly revisit that post before looking ahead to 2020.

The mid-year update promised a few things:

• Make a Game: I was working on the art for the upcoming game Zookeeper. Progress has been good since then-- the game now has a planned launch date for April of this year. There's also a teaser trailer which you can see here-- it shows a lot of the art that I made for the game: zookeeper trailer
• Exotic Lands: Huge success, expanded beyond the original idea and released! This set was split up into three separate releases, two small and one large.
• Icons: Success! We released these in small chunks throughout the year, and compiled them into an ultimate set to release just as 2019 was coming to an end.
• Faces: I want to call it a failure because they're not released yet-- BUT I did release a full set of faces as a beta release. I'm just not happy with their quality, and I'll be re-creating them over the next couple of months. So for now, I'll say that the status of this one is ongoing... it's the first goal for 2020 though!
• Unity Optimization: I'm shifting the goalpost a bit for this one... I originally planned to re-release every pack in a special unity format for the unity store. But now, as we're closer to finishing up the main Time Fantasy series, I think I might just do it all at once and release an ultimate mega-pack. So this would be something that I think about towards the summer of this year. Sorry if anybody was really waiting for this one-- it'll still happen, but in a slightly different form.

In that mid-year update post, I also talked about something new...

There are two common requests that I get a lot: 1: individual pieces that can be mixed-and-matched or in a character generator; 2: four-directional attack animations for action combat.

For many reasons, I've turned down these requests. The primary one is that Time Fantasy characters just wasn't designed for this sort of thing-- other reasons stem from that. It's not a good fit for the way that the characters are constructed; especially when there are already so many characters made.

But a new set, built from the ground-up-- designed to be versatile, customizable, fit into a character generator-- and with lots of animations for action combat... something that takes into account everything that I have learned and grown since beginning the Time Fantasy project, a different look for characters but could still fit in stylistically with the existing TF tilesets...

...now THAT is something worth thinking about!

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Goals for 2020

Okay... this post is getting long... nobody is reading through all this, right? (let me know in the comments if you see this sentence LOL). So-- let's run through these rapid-fire:

Release Goals:

1. Faces

This is my first priority for this year. I plan to pump these out at a relatively-quick pace over the next month or two. This will be the first big release this year-- if these are done by the end of February and ready for a release in the first week of March, I'll be very happy.

2. Steampunk Tileset

This is one of the most-requested tileset themes, and I'll be putting this together as my next release after the faces set. I'm planning on using this set to "bridge" between Time Fantasy and the next thing: I want to release this one with two color schemes (similar to the two color schemes that I used for the icons release, but a little more controlled).

This tileset will be the last major pack release in the Time Fantasy series, and will lead into the sequel style, that I want to being building this year.

(Don't worry, Time Fantasy will never go away entirely-- I'll continue with small releases, requests, etc. But my art style and ability has evolved a lot since the series began, and I'm ready to push the limits and work on the next generation.)

3. New Style Character Sets

See above-- when I hinted at 'something new' from my mid-year update. Right now these aren't even in the planning stages yet, really it's just an idea... but I'm excited. I'm sure that I'll have some more detailed posts later on, and I'll be asking for patron input and ideas.

4. Time Fantasy Remaster + New Style Ultimate Tileset Collection

I want to remaster the Time Fantasy tiles to have better colors-- at the same time, the existing stuff is a mess of releases, and I want to organize and arrange everything into an 'ultimate' collection. It would include a full set of tilesets with the 'classic Time Fantasy' color palette as well as updated colors, and the new character set style would be designed to work with both. This (and the characters) will be a massive project that I expect to dominate the second half of 2020.

 I'll revisit this in the future with more detailed updates.  

 5. Smaller Releases

I will continue to release smaller sets throughout the year. These are things like the Beast Tribes or Animated NPC packs, or the freebie tilesets that I release as goal rewards. I won't plan them too far ahead (especially since they are often based on patron requests)-- but I want to keep up the momentum and release 2 or 3 new ones, just like the past few years.

AND OF COURSE... 

I will keep up with our consistent weekly releases (twice-a-week in most cases!) and fulfilling patron requests. As always, that's number one! All of the larger projects are created in the space between our regular weekly releases.

Looking forward to a big 2020!

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This post ended up being a lot bigger than I'd planned-- it always ends up that though, doesn't it?

Anyways-- I'll be back after the weekend with some graphics. I'll start hitting the patron request thread, and we'll be back on track for the regular release schedule-- so keep them coming!

See you on Monday; have a great weekend.

Thanks!