Alright, guys, gals and others. I'm going to be blunt here and admit that November did not go the way I'd planned. Which is going to have some follow on effects. The biggest issue, and one I've been stressing like heck over, is that I may have gotten everything else done...but I barely scratched the surface of the Sound Project. The entire point in doing a quick-and-easy game was supposed to be that I could use the time freed up to devote to sorting that out. I'd planned to get roughly 60 animations done with the new sound in November.
Instead I managed a grand total of 24. Out of more than 200 animations in the game -_-. Actually, I think the final count might have broken 250.
Yeah. That's a problem. It's doubly as problem as December is already sort of a hell month for me. I have to take time on for family stuff around Christmas every year, as it's the only time of the year most of family drags their way together from all across the country. They'd show up to knock me out and drag me away to participate if I didn't do it voluntarily. That, unfortunately, always takes a bite out of December and I often struggle to get everything done as a result. It's going to be worse this year, too, for various personal reasons I'm not going to get into. Suffice it to say everyone in my immediate family had been having a rough few months. Some of my extended family, too, actually. Everything from my mother going on dialysis, my cousin needing brain surgery for a tumor, and my sister's entire apartment block having a sewage flood that damaged like 90% of her possessions.
The result of this is that I've been sort of fighting back anxiety attacks and trying to figure out for the last few days what the fuck I'm going to do to make things work. The answer, as much as I really don't like it, is that I need to cut out the Mixed Media Short this month. I purely hate that, as its a baked in reward for certain tiers. But I just can't figure out a way to make it work. I need to:
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1) Push on with The Modded Player.
2) Get a lot more of the Sound Project done this month than last month.
3) Maintain my other Patreon that is, in fact, actually paying the bills more than this one right now. Go fucking figure that the side project I made writing fanfiction as a way to get myself out of a different dead-end side job from hell is now making significantly more money, for a fraction of the time and effort invested, that this games Patreon is making.
4) Do all of that when I'm gong to lose pretty much an entire week out of the month.
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Yeah. That's...well, I've been dipping into the Xanax I normally try not to touch while trying to figure out what to do. So, the highpoints of what I've hacked out in the last few days are thus:
1) I'm not doing the Mixed Media Short this month. If this bothers any of the $20 Patrons, contact me and I'll refund you a part of your monthly Patronage. I'm not trying to screw people over by skipping out on rewards here. I'll appreciate it if you decide you don't care, but if you do, send me a PM and I'll get it taken care of.
2) I'm going to do a Holiday-Focused Short Story so that I don't have to worry about the usual polling complexities. One slight weight off my mind.
3) I bit off more than I could chew or, more accurately, got overly ambitious with The Modded Player. This isn't really a bad thing, though it did contribute to not getting enough other stuff done in November. I'm officially extending what was supposed to be a November-December project to a November-December-January project. This will allow me to do the game full justice, while also allowing me to take another month for the Sound Project overhaul for Left Hand Magic. I'm expecting the end result to be that The Modded Player is probably a 300+ render game, instead of the 200 MAX that I expected/planned for it to be.
4) This will also allow me to run more polls for the next MAJOR game, to hopefully be started after Left Hand Magic's final form release. The second such poll will most likely be up tomorrow, with a brief overview of the results from The First One, which I just closed out the voting for.
Deep Sigh
Okay, that's...a lot. Sorry for having to cut things down like this, this month, folks. I've done my dead level best for years not to have to skip out on rewards. I just don't think I can realistically pull it off this time, even pulling the usual long hours form hell that I normally fill December with...