The Big Update! (Patreon)

Ok so this upcoming change has been a long time coming. I've been creating monthly animations for over six years now without missing one or running late, and for the last few years I've felt like I need to make some big changes if I want to improve my content for you all and for my own mental health. The TLDR is that I won't be uploading full animations/votes to a set monthly schedule moving forward to allow me to improve my content. This change will start in January of 2024.

Why the change?

-The monthly schedule doesn't always fit with the project I'm working on. Sometimes ideas that would work great as short detailed scenes, have to be dragged out to an extended month project. Often ideas that I would want to put a lot more work into I have to shorten down to a month or two projects. This also means that as my cast of characters grows, people may not see their favorites as often as they would like to as characters that are harder to work with can't be in votes as often.

-The nature of 3D animation means I will often have a lot of troubleshooting to do. In some cases I've had issues that have meant I've had to cut down the project to upload on time, or I will not risk certain scenes because they could delay the animation. Sacrificing quality to meet deadlines is something I've had to do frequently and it's hard when as a result I see criticism of areas which I can't fix on this schedule. Sometimes when I see an idea really isn't working well, I can't just scrap it and move on to something new, I have to just continue even when I see it not turning out well. I get told “We don’t mind if it’s late” which I appreciate, but that would leave me with less time for the next month's animation.

-I've reached the limit on what I'm capable of doing per month. I'd really like to collaborate with other artists/voice actors/game developers. I want to learn new software and plugins, and ideally move my work over to blender so I could collaborate with more creators. Being able to develop characters full time instead of bit by bit over a year would be a huge help too. I'm always worried about trying out new software and plugins in case it messes up my current setup and delays my monthly animations. I barely finish each animation on time each month so it doesn't leave much time free for these endeavors.

-I feel like I've been riding years worth of burnout and this could be the only fix for that. I've never missed an animation upload for all the years and although I'm proud of that, it also really scares me to break away from that change now.

How things will change

-No set project deadlines. Some months may be a single detailed loop or progress updates, some months may be a much larger project upload. Whatever happens there will still be monthly content, that's always been important to me to provide as you are paying a monthly fee, you should receive monthly content.

-This will allow me to work on consecutive projects which will mean higher quality but less frequent animations. This could mean higher polish, higher FPS and resolution, more time spent on character rig development. I imagine the larger animations would be a multi month projects, and the shorter one off loops could be done in a week or two. I can't give exact time scales right now as I need to be working in this new way for a while to see what I'll be capable of.

-Votes will be saved for larger projects so will no longer be monthly. I want to be able to work on my own choice of smaller loops while working on the larger voted projects. Being able to do my own choice of smaller loops will be a great test bed for the larger voted for projects. The last planned vote using the old schedule will be at the start of December. I plan to use votes for more than just animation selection. 

-Creator collaboration. With the flexible time I would be able to collaborate with other creators. You would think collaborating would speed up a project, but merging two creators' workflows on one project really slows things down. I was working on an unanounced Crittermatic VR project for a while with another creator, but we hit too many issues and I ran out of free time to continue it. I'd like to start that up again. The first collaboration project planned will be with Tasuric, after that I have quite a few other artists I’d love to work with.

-Development outside of animation. I want to be able to run a proper Discord server. If you're on the current server you will see it is very limited as I don't have the time to deal with any potential problems/content moderation. I’ll likely be needing some extra moderator help as the server expands so if that’s something you have experience with and would like to help, please send me a message. My website is also in desperate need of a renovation to be able to access all my content easier, I'll be testing some new methods of linking content soon.

I’ve felt like my content has stagnated and I can’t improve it or my mental health without this change. It will be a short time of experimentation to see what works best but I hope you will all see a big improvement as a result. Thank you all for your support <3