Meet Sunsetriders7 (Patreon)

As many of you likely already know, I do all the work on SU myself, from the art to the coding. Those who’ve been here for a long time know I used to do pics and comics as well but scaled back to mainly just games. Smokeshank taking care of almost everything else allows me to focus on just working. I do like the game work a lot because I can switch between drawing, programming and writing.

I started drawing when I was little, won a lot of competitions growing up and even went to a private art school for a year or two. Once I got to Highschool though, I realized that a job in art would just mean drawing things I didn't care about for other people. I switched my focus to computers, but the schools were comically behind on technology, so I just dropped out. I went on to work jobs that I was mostly neutral to and that were physical-labor intensive.

I come from the Canadian country side where everyone is either a farmer, trucker or logger. I started trucking with my dad since most of my family is truckers and it's easy work to do. Most of it I enjoyed, but it can also be a tough job tied to strict deadlines. While trucking, I still built my own computers and kept up with them in my free time. Somewhere around 2003-2004 I bought my graphics tablet and started to work on digital drawing in Photoshop. I still use the same tablet to this day and will probably continue to do so till it finally dies.

I mostly tried to work on drawing people and ended up doing hentai stuff mainly because it was the hardest version of anatomy. Eventually I started to post stuff online rather than just see it rot away on my computers. Over time I got a large following, though I would usually drop out for long stretches when I was still trucking. I received a bunch of offers to join pay sites and tried working as a commission artist for a short time. At one point Smokeshank and I decided to try to start a business, which was fun but ended up failing. (He pretty much covered it in his bio post.)

After that business venture, when I came back to drawing, I noticed Patreon starting to become popular and thought it was finally a great way for an artist to do what he wanted to do and make enough money to do it. Akabur was leading the way back then and I think a lot of people go into it because of his example. I never thought it would be as successful as it has been all these years.

I had messed around with programming and Unity for years and wanted to try to do games on the side. Originally, they were mostly an afterthought. We even had them at the $20 level when we started out, lol! I made Bend or Break as a test to try out a Visual Novel style game and it went a lot better than I could have hoped. SU was originally started shortly after it was released. At the time though, I was still doing pics, comics and other things, so there was little time put towards it back then.

After a bunch of shake ups we decided to mainly focus on games and eventually making a studio. SU has really become something insane compared to what I originally scribbled on a piece of paper. It's evolved far beyond anything I could have imagined and still continues to surprise me at times when some things come together in it.

I am really grateful to you guys for letting us be able to do this in the first place. It can be a hard job sometimes, but it is a lot more fulfilling than just driving up and down the same stretches of highway all day. There's still a long ways to go with SU and GG, and I'm looking forward to how other projects turn out in the future.

Sincerely,

SunsetRiders7