Phew. That's 2024 done.
If you're new here and have no idea what I'm doing here, at the turn of the new year I like to take a moment to look back at the past year and celebrate all the good things that happened. A lot of not great things happened in 2024; financial support fell then stagnated, client work slowed way down, burnout hit me real hard, my grandmother passed, and so many other small things that made life harder and slowed down development.
Thankfully, there's still plenty of good that happened, too. There's still a lot that I'm incredibly thankful for and that I'm at least a little bit proud of. So, without any further ado:
Starting with the boring stuff, as much as my Patreon income hasn't reached the month-to-month peak that it hit at the end of 2023, I still had some good months thanks to those of you that signed up for the 1-year subscription that I'm now able to offer. Some of the other numbers also hit an all-time high, with paid members actually reaching 50 right at the end of December and total members being on the bleeding edge of 200.
I also opened up a Subscribestar page, giving people who either don't like or can't use Patreon for whatever reason a new option to support me. While their payout rules mean I probably won't see a single cent from the support there for a long time yet (unless a whole bunch of you join all at once, anyway), I'm already over 20 members there.
Whether the money is where I want it to be or not, it still means a lot to me that anyone out there is showing me any kind of support. Especially in a year like 2024, it goes a long way toward keeping me going. Like I've said so many times already, and will continue to say as long as it continues to be true - whether you gave me a dollar and canceled immediately, joined one of those ridiculous expensive tiers and have stuck around for years, are somewhere in between, or have just been lurking in the "follow for free" section, thank you so much for being here.
Wrapping up the business side of things, the itch bundles didn't slow down even a little bit. From the smaller bundles to the giant mega-bundles, from the sales to the tips, the support on itch has gone a long way toward keeping me above water. As much as I still have a lot of room to grow before it really starts making a difference, the support I see there and the success of the bundles I've run still makes a little difference, and that still matters to me.
Seriously, just look at these things. The success of these bundles hasn't been life-changing for me, but they have made a difference for some of the devs in those bundles, and some of those differences have been life-changing. Getting to bring so many people together and seeing that show of support has been such an incredible experience (even if a few of those devs are a pain in my ass - you know who you are <3). If I end up failing out of indie game development and find myself unable to keep making games, I will still forever be humbled by the generosity of fans and the difference I've managed to make in my little corner of the community.
To talk about game development specifically, I really wish I'd gotten more of Precious Kouhai done, but at the moment, everyone seems to want my attention focused on Maids & Masters. Which is fair, because Maids & Masters is so, so close to the end of the story.
I'll probably still be spending most of 2025 working on Maids & Masters, because there's still a lot to do besides telling the rest of the story, and I have no idea what development is going to be like for these last few core updates. Like with basically every update to Maids & Masters, I'm tackling something I've never done before, but this time it's on a completely different scale.
Once those last few updates are done, there's still other touch-ups on content that I want to add, too, with the biggest piece of that content being the remaining affection quests. It's incredibly exciting being this close to done, though. Having that first completed project as a notch in my belt is something I've looked forward to since starting Maids & Masters more than three years ago, and it's only gotten more important to me as the game grew in scope and scale. I continue to learn a lot about game development and storytelling through interactive media, and I'm feeling deeply impatient to put all of that experience to work into a future project.
Where Maids & Masters is a story I wanted to tell combined with an excuse to learn as much as I can about RPG Maker, and Precious Kouhai is almost entirely an excuse to get better at creating visuals and animating (with learning Ren'Py being a nice bonus), I'm really eager to put these metaphorical muscles to work instead of just - comparatively speaking, anyway - lifting weights for the sake of moving something heavy.
Back on the topic of future projects, I was finally able to make a demo that's near and dear to me, because it's the project I initially wanted to make first: Light Eternal: Dawnfall. It's the first project I pitched to someone else when I was looking to join a team rather than take on solo development, it's the oldest game design document I have in my ever-growing stockpile of GDDs, and it's a story I'd been working on for years before all that. Having both the tools and the skills to bring that project to life, even if it is just a demo, feels like a phenomenal step forward.
So, here's to 2025.
If everything pans out the way I want, I'll have Maids & Masters finished in a few months, spend the next few months after that following up on the end of the story with the rest of the side content I want to make while I finish Precious Kouhai, and I'll have you voting for my next project on Patreon and Subscribestar to have the first official update of that project in your hands before 2026.
There's also another thing I still can't quite talk about, but I'm very much looking forward to telling you about it as soon as I can. As much as there are a handful of things the future holds that I'm very much not looking forward to, 2025 still looks like it's going to be an incredibly exciting year. Here's to sharing it with you.
Stay cultured, you beautiful bastard, you.
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