New Year, New Roo (Reasons Why) (Patreon)

TL;DR I'm making changes to how I'm doing things on Patreon. Below is my breakdown of why I'm doing it.

To Start...

"New Roo" is on the level of "slightly updated Roo.0 release" more like. I just wanted to talk a bit about the Patreon, lessons learned, and changes I'm making to try to improve. I did a similar post like this at the beginning of last year.

What happened last year?

Well, there's elephant in the room, which is still ongoing, and I have neither the energy nor desire to talk much about it. It sucks, and I'm personally looking at toilet paper and hand soap very differently as a result. Let's just focus on the Patreon.

First off, moving to Monthly Polls worked out great, and it's really awesome to get a community starting and growing to both fund and participate in crazier and crazier ideas. This is exactly the kind of energy and passion I've been hoping to give and making sure everyone gets something that they're looking for, especially because it's so weird and rare.

Unfortunately, Camel Ale took too long to make, and there's no particularly good reason for that. It was started around September 2019 and finished in June of 2020. I had a hard time balancing the monthly poll stuff against the bigger picture projects, especially after losing and starting a new job in-between.

I want to try more Madlib/group vote comics again in the future, but with a rule of "heads down until it's done". If something is a multi-month project, then the polls and monthly deliverables just have to orient around getting it done and done well.

The Cursed Game of Cursed Items has been an on and off success. On and off because I set up a poll about where to focus and a high number of people voted to keep it 50% art and 50% game development. Truthfully, this is a healthy balance over going all-in; I seem to have a bad tendency to cram really hard when I try to squeeze game features, especially this last December.

It's clear game projects are going to feel like molasses because of the off-and-on nature and because of the scope of this particular project; I still want to make more weird TF games, and I hope that the work on Cursed Game can open up some unexplored weird avenues (which I'll try to talk about once I'm able). I plan to be as open as possible about the process of making Cursed Game, but I acknowledge I tend to get stuck in my head a lot.

The Discord group has been great! I initially only set it up temporarily for game development feedback, and it's been absolutely essential in keeping in touch with folks. I've noticed that Patreon doesn't automatically clear out former members, but during a time like this when many patrons and furs are losing their jobs and being strongly urged to self-isolate, I see no reason to remove anyone from the server. I've already made separations between patron-only and open rooms, and I think that's just the right way to do this until the situation is over.

I'm still having trouble balancing between Patreon monthlies, Patreon large projects, personal art, and commission art. I tried doing things where I stopped work on one thing to pick up another, but that left a very unhappy commission queue because of the long waits. I'm working on a balance, but it starts with being more transparent, with everyone. I'm planning to re-open commissions again and I'm going to start by moving to using a price sheet and sticking to the sheet.

Finally, I want to quick talk about Patreon Goals for your contributions and why the goals are shifty.

* Art streams are great, but Picarto has moved to a model of not letting people talk anonymously in the chat. While I understand the change, I hate it, and I'm considering alternatives.

* Flash is also dead forever, and I might not go for the license for Adobe's replacement because I don't know if I have the time to animate as much as I initially wanted.

Patreon funds will still go directly into projects. However, it's more likely the Patreon funds will buy things direct from the Unity Asset Store as needed or (fingers crossed) occasionally hire additional help for future game development. I don't think I'll be pursuing any software subscriptions as a goal any more.

And that's it!

Thanks for reading! It was a lot of walls of text.