Minish Cartography is changing

Hi Everyone. It's been a while since I've done a life update for the Patrons. I've been considering some changes to the way I do things for a while and I've now decided on several changes that I'll be making. None of this will come into effect until the end of the year so you have a bit of warning but I'm excited about the upcoming changes and I hope you will be too. I'm also keen to hear what you all think about these changes in the comments below.

First of all, the reason for this change. Currently, I only work on Minish Cartography for a relatively small number of hours in the week. I have 4 year old twins and I look after them so my wife can work, during the week I get three half days of work on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday when the twins go to kindy or to my Mum's house for pat of the day. The twins turn 5 later in the year and from the beginning of next year they'll be starting school, so I'll have more work time overall, but I'll also have blocks of year during the school holidays where I get no work time so i want to align my work schedule to work better with my family responsibilities.

I'm also keen to refocus my work a bit and create more focused collections of higher quality assets and bring my assets to more storefronts as well as have time to work on other things which align well with my maps and assets. With the in mind, I'll lay out the changes I'm planning below, I'm quite set on 1 and 2 now but the rest I'm still thinking about.

1 - The big change is going to be the frequency of asset packs. Currently I do a monthly pack with a two month pack over the Christmas and summer holidays period in December-January. I'm going to change to creating one asset pack per school term (in NZ the school year runs from February to mid-December and is split into 4, 9-11 week terms with 2 week gaps between). So we'll be getting less frequent but significantly larger asset packs, on average I'll work on a pack for two and a half months and I'll also get more work time each week so I'm hoping to be able to create packs which will sell for $15-$20 each where my typical packs now are sold for $4.

1a - As there will no longer be a monthly output to go with the monthly patreon cycle, I'm thinking I'll release new assets to patrons as I complete them so early access will become a patron benefit. I'm also planning to do a lot more concept assets, and block out time for this activity. As I'll be working for longer on packs, I want to have a better idea of the core look and feel of the pack before starting. I'm also thinking I'll make all these concept assets available in patron exclusive packs. I'm also thinking I'll start offering a yearly patreon subscription option, but I need to look into this a bit more.

2 - Going forward I'm thinking that I'll choose the pack themes rather than having a vote to decide what I'm working on. Having the votes has had it's good aspects but in the case where I end up working on something I'm not that enthusiastic about I've had big issues with having the motivation to sit down and work during the month. I'm still keen to get input and ideas from patrons but I'll make the final decisions about what I work on.

2a - Maybe I'll also start up a voting system on the concept assets where, when I've made some new concept assets, I'll ask if the community wants a pack of these assets or if they would rather I work on other things with the popular ones going a list that I choose off. I'm not quite sure about this though, let me know what you think.

3 - I'm considering trying my hand at making videos. Specifically mapping and drawing tutorials and content about realistic map design and world building. I might try some small ones and see how I feel about it and if I enjoy it this may become a larger part of what I do, but we'll see.

4 - I'm keen to redo my website (wordpress, which I use currently does not allow me to sell digital products on the site so I want to change over to squarespace) at some point and also start listing my assets on more stores. Setting all this up will take a bunch of time so that will be a job for next year.

5 - Having used DungeonDraft a bit this year, it's alright but I'm not too keen on it, it lacks a lot of features I would like to have for map making and it's not great for isometric maps. I'm considering trying to make my own mapping application at some point, with a focus on isometric maps. My background is actually in software engineering, I got into mapping back in 2020 just after I left my last software job and didn't really expect to end up doing mapping as a job, but here we are.

That plenty to think about now so I'll stop there. Let me know all your thoughts in the comments below. I'm thinking that, at the end of this year, I'll do a larger pack across November to mid December then take Christmas and January off and start into the new schedule when the twins start school in early February.