2020 Retrospective: The Annual "What I'm Up To" Post (Patreon)

Well, that was... a year.

I know I'm about two weeks late to actually writing this up but in my defense Kaz and have kicked off the new year by both getting sick as hell for a prolonged and irritating period of time. I'm still sort of on the last stint of dealing with that, so if this is somehow even more meandering than usual do try to forgive me!

I went into 2020 with some pretty lofty goals! And they all died, one by one, in a sad march towards oblivion, because of course they did. It was 2020, the year was a nightmare. It was humbling, irritating, a little bit soul-crushing, and just generally the sort of environment where a lot of analysis about what really matters is going to run up into a wall of soul-defining apathy until only your most burning passions survive. Is... is that good or bad? I think that depends on who you ask.

My goal to crank Thralls out died to doubt and hesitation, but in its stead rose an effort to find a kind of production pipeline that doesn't leave me exhausted. This got us Hare Moon, a thing I'm enjoying doing when I find the time and mindset for it, even though it's sort of weird and maybe a bit questionable in its direction. Pages only take a few hours typically, so the main hurdle has been feeling like I'm allowed to work on it between the obligation to have things to post on social media so I don't stagnate into oblivion and my obligations to commissioners that I'm frankly terrible about.

On which note it's worth acknowledging that the sketch tiers probably aren't ever making a come-back. I haven't really dented that backlog at all, and beyond that I've more or less reduced commissions down to the rare YCH I feel I can crank out pretty quickly. I... sort of prefer things this way, but compounded with everything else it's basically rendered the Patreon something of a glorified tip jar with the stray perk here and there. I'm kind of okay with that though and might just update the language on here to reflect such. Y'all will still get your boons when they happen, but it's pretty obvious there's no sense pretending any of them are worth paying extra for.

Livestreams have gotten more rare. We've experimented with more directed sketch commissions via the Make You Hard Drive and its evolved form the Kitty Arcade, but that's not really taking off in any meaningful way so I've sort of just dropped it. Sometimes I'll stream something I find interesting or attempt a themed stream of some sort (or just a KA again), but it's steadily becoming less of a focus, and it's pretty obvious that Picarto is not a platform worth investing a ton of time and effort into growing an audience on for me, especially as more and more of what I'd consider stream-worthy is becoming content I intend to release primarily on here behind a paywall.

I guess in less words, 2020 was sort of a downer. I still want to do Thralls at some point, but I have a lot of conflicting feelings about it and doubts about it finding an audience that really hold me back from putting in the work. The only project that's continued thriving amidst all the trips and hiccups is Lonely Hooves.

Which, to be fair, that's where most of my heart's been. Chapter 3 really touches on a lot of personal stuff for both of us working on it, and it's where the story starts to make our intentions clear. It feels like it has a purpose, and I'm back to considering working it into the Patreon despite my legal concerns just because, ultimately, if you're supporting me, you're primarily supporting it. We've started building a website and I'm pretty happy with the progress we've made on that in the last couple months! We're going to have new author commentary for all the pages, dedicated comments sections for each of them, some features we wished the social media we posted to offered like content warnings and (obviously) page navigation / bookmarking, the whole nine yards. I'm even trying to future-proof it for multi-language support for if translations ever pick up again. I've learned a lot working on it as I haven't constructed a website outside of rare forays into someone else's CSS since like high school. There's a lot of new tools at my disposal, even if I am a glutton for punishment sitting around writing up HTML in Notepad++.

Look at my baby!

Coding's sort of been the name of the game so far for 2021. Illness has a way of making my equilibrium intensely questionable, and as a result hunching over a tablet has a distinct lack of appeal. Consequently, I tend to end up doing other things, and somewhere amidst the fever dreams I woke up one day with a weird and intense desire to try and make a random idea into a proper thing, resulting in me downloading Game Maker for the first time in years, creating the bare bones of a procedural map generator, composing the first piece of BGM in FL, farting a bit of concept art during a power outage, and finally making a new Discord channel for backers to keep up with it if they're interested because my sudden hyperobsession was flooding my other channels with weird nerd nonsense. The working title is Orphan Wood and if your main interest in my work is the horniness of it you'll probably find my intentions pretty disappointing, but I'm having fun actually using my brain to solve problems for a change instead of just fretting over things I can't control in an endless mental loop. Here's some bits of concept!

The goal is something I'd visually describe as "The Mildly Upsetting Mana" with a lot of thought being spent so far trying to consider what sort of things would be just creepy enough that an adult would be like "haha NOPE" but a child's curiosity would be unphased. I don't know how well I'll succeed on that specific front, but it's a fun mental exercise. I'm covering a fair bit of new territory with it, but between my musical endeavors, the coding stuff I've been doing, and what exactly's been so invigorating (albeit difficult) with Lonely lately, that tends to be the common thread. My day job is dreadfully boring, artistically I feel a little bit like I'm being shoehorned into being a one trick pony, and honestly I think I'm just... really bored?? I spent a big chunk of the earlier parts of 2020 wondering if art was even what I wanted to be focusing on anymore until my day job came in and drug me back from work-from-home kicking and screaming so I didn't have the time or energy to dwell on that question anymore, but my natural interests seem to be progressing towards exploring new avenues and stretching my creative legs.

My one other project over the year was trying to beat Hatsune Miku's English voice bank into singing a song about your rule 34 being really into the attention and also maybe a succubus, though, so clearly there's still some sort of horny lingering around in here. (That's been on the cusp of done for months, mind, but I just... can't leave it alone and stay happy with it?? It'll be here eventually, I swear! I've put too much effort into it for it not to be.) The day after Christmas was Kazmas, wherein I just went crazy lewding my wife's fursona on-stream. My weird rhythm-puzzle game prototype a few months back was meant to be pretty horny when all was said and done, but let's just say my patience for Unity has fizzled out for several very good reasons so it's shelved (for now, maybe I'll try prototyping that in GM at some point too, though I'm not sure what the end result on the intended art direction would be). The stuff most of y'all are here for (I think??) is still around, just interspersed with my weird whims an ideas and explorations, and I hope that's alright.

Thus leaning towards the tip jar mentality. This sort of attitude is incredibly hard to sell and leaves me struggling to consistently have something worth posting on here, but I appreciate those of you who've stuck around despite it all (and, you know, the plague).

Here's hoping my weird whims and fever-driven ideas give me some magic to work with in 2021.