February Update

Hi, everyone! Today I've got a story for you, and after that a very important announcement. Before I get to those though, I'm quickly going to run through some updates to let you all know what's going on.

Let's start by filling you all in on the stuff I've been talking about in my last few updates.

• The Omicron wave down here in South Africa came and went without much misery. Government restrictions have been rolled back quite significantly, and life has (for the most part)returned to normal.

• Electricity supply is still an issue, but so far, it looks like things have improved. At the beginning of the year there were a lot of power outages due to planned maintenance, but in the last two weeks I've had a pretty steady power supply and have been able to ramp up productivity again very nicely! Here's hoping that that trend continues for as long as possible! (edit: As I was about to post this, a new round of rolling blackouts was announced. sigh!)

Next, some news that's far more relevant, and hopefully more exciting! There is a new Champion on the way, and I think she might be the coolest one yet! Here's a quick look at her:

As you can see, this one's a tiefling ranger, but for those at the Versatile Polymorpher tier, she can be a human, elf or half-elf. She'd also work very well as a rogue, archer or assassin, depending on which colour options you go with. I'm working very hard to get her out as quickly as possible, but she's still a couple weeks away. I'll be posting previews on the discord server, so do pop in there and say "hi" to check how she's coming along.

We'll wrap up this section of updates with a quick mention of the new bonus set that's just been posted in case you missed it. This set, dubbed "Ornery People", contains a bunch of villagers who aren't happy to see the adventurers roll into their town, which I thought would make a nice contrast to the overly cheerful look of most townsfolk minis out there, and hopefully you'll find them to be an interesting addition to your paper mini collections! I am doing away with bonus sets of this sort after this one, and replacing them with something better! More about that in the announcement at the end of this post. 

And now, it's story time!

This story is about me, and the Champions Series project, why I started it, what I wanted out of it and all the trials and tribulations behind it. I'm telling it to offer some background before I make the announcement, and to give a little context to this whole thing. If you find that uninteresting, feel free to skip straight to the announcement at the end!

Introduction

This place is populated by some of my most loyal fans, and if you're among them, you probably already know this, but for anyone reading this who doesn't, I was already a veteran at the paper mini game when most of the other big names in the scene were just getting started.

Back in those early days, I wasn't on Patreon... In fact, I avoided it as hard as I possibly could! Instead, I had a whole other business model and it was working really well for me. I mostly sold my content through online stores, like DriveThruRPG and papercraftdungeon.com. My general strategy at the time was focus on stuff that no one else was doing, and to make that stuff in the coolest possible way, and consequently I released a lot of townsfolk packs... At the time, no one else wanted to do them, and so I had that part of the market cornered for a little while.

Had I continued on the path that I was on, I would have expanded out, and would have been churning out armies of customisable monsters, but instead I got possessed by an idea... something that no one else was doing: The Champions Series!

I sat on the idea for months, as I kept churning out townsfolk packs. The idea really grew on me, but it was clear that I couldn't do that sort of project the way I'd done all my others. The problem was that it was overly specific... It seemed to me that while a GM might buy every monster and townsfolk pack that I put out, that the only person who'd buy a female tiefling bard was someone who really needed a female tiefling bard, even if it was a really cool tiefling bard with a horse, and customisable accessories and everything!

I sat on the idea a little longer and it became clear that such a project would only be possible through a platform like Patreon... and I was avoiding Patreon, so I kept sitting on the idea and churning out townsfolk.

While I was avoiding Patreon, I was very aware of developments there, because I was friends with many of the other paper mini creators who were using it. At some point, Patreon decided to change their policy on their commission rates, and they set a date where the new policy would come into effect. All Patreons that had been started before that cut-off date would get the far more generous rate of their old policy, and so it was clear that if I was going to pull the trigger on this project I had in mind, that there was never going to be a better time to do so, and so I plunged right in and got started!

Now, this isn't a happy story or a boastful one. It's one about pride coming before a fall... like a Greek tragedy, or a fable by Aesop. The moral, that there's a very big difference between imagining something and making it a reality... 

I very confidently went in imagining that I'd knock out all the art I needed in a very short amount of time and be able to consistently do that month after month. I was very, very wrong!

Part 1: The first cut

The first problem was that I couldn't actually draw horses and had to learn how to. Today I've drawn dozens of them and I daresay I'm starting to get good at it... these days, drawing horses comes fairly naturally to me, but back then it was a real struggle. It took several attempts just to get the Templar's horse to actually look even close to right, and that alone took several days.

The next big struggle was in getting the character to look consistent across the entire  set. Artists make it look easy, but it's actually incredibly difficult to draw the same face from multiple angles with unique expressions and make it look like they're all the same person... That's another thing I eventually got better at, but it was a very steep learning curve. If you've ever looked through the Champions and wondered why the Templar's face is so much less detailed than the later ones, you now know why!

Another bugbear soon revealed itself! All the figures in the set had to be dressed the same... With my prior sets, it didn't much matter if I got really fancy with the design of a character because I'd only have to draw it once, but with the Champions I'd have to draw it over and over again. the newer Champions tend to have much simpler designs because I've learnt this lesson the hard way, but when I did the Templar, I was horribly naive and gave her a very fancy outfit. She had chainmail everywhere! She had very elaborate boots! She had this absolutely crazy metal belt buckle with this very ornate medallion detail! She also had 5 different hair styles, all of which were packed with intricate details and I had to draw those hairstyles 9 times each!

The point I'm trying to make is that it took me 50 whole days of solid work to create all the art for her, and that's about 5 times as long as I'd hoped it'd take. I was pleased (and very relieved) when I put out the first Simple tier PDF... She turned out really well, but let's be honest, she arrived several weeks later than she was meant to!

I hadn't even started the Prismatic Chameleon version of the PDF yet, let alone the Versatile Polymorpher version. I couldn't even anticipate how much work those would land up being, or how long it would take to get those done. Just to give you an idea of what goes into one of those, a Versatile Polymorpher PDF generally has something in the region of 800 individual tiff images that need to be precisely placed in a layout that has around 120 or more layers. There are clickable buttons, which means I not only have to design the button panel, but also manually place each of the orange squares to indicate when a layer is on or off, and create Javascript to make the buttons functional. On the Versatile Polymorpher sets there are as many as 80 clickable buttons! Back then I'd spend an entire 12-hour day making the 800 tiff images, and another entire day manually placing each of them in the layout. Another day placing all the orange squares and another to program all the buttons. Then I'd have to spend another whole day, or two, just fixing all the mistakes that crept in along the way. Well, you already know that I managed to get them all out in the end, but they were several weeks behind schedule.

All-in-all, I was off to an embarrassingly terrible start!

Part 2: Digging myself deeper

Now, I'm no quitter... If anything, I'm dangerously optimistic. I  moved on to the next Champion, the Elven Mage, with the firm belief that it'd go much quicker this time around. I wasn't entirely wrong... I'd learned a lot from the Templar, and I was getting better at drawing horses. I'd figured out a slightly more efficient workflow too. It did go quicker... it only took 30 days to get the art sorted this time, but it still took a whole week to make each of the higher tier PDFs. Everything was awfully late, yet again!

Now I knew I had to up my game and do something to boost productivity... I started working on automating things. The first script I wrote was one that would place all of the 800+ tiffs into the pdf layout. That was quite the uphill battle. Days went by as I figured out the algorithm and hammered out the code to implement it. I didn't even get it completely right, and even today, I regularly go back in and improve on the code and iron out some bugs. As imperfect as the script was, once I got it working, and ran it for the first time, it was beautiful! Those 800+ tiffs just placed themselves, and a task that had previously taken me a whole 12 hours of grueling labour happened automatically in under 5 minutes. I could hit a button, go make some coffee and return to a fully laid out 120 layer PDF! That script alone has saved me hundreds of hours on all my subsequent Champions, and I've since gone on to automate many other parts of the process too.

Don't think that that's an entirely positive note to this story though... It came with downsides. I started the art for the third champion, the Troubadour, about a week later than I needed to, and then had to rush through to try and get her out the door on time.  I was feeling pretty confident after my first 2 champions and was sure I'd get her done quickly and release her on time for a change, especially now that I had that fancy script to place all the tiffs for me. Yet again, pride came before a fall... 

The Troubadour turned out great in the end... To this day she remains my favourite of all the Champions. It was also around this time that I actually started to get better at drawing horses, so her horse is the first one that actually looked good to me. Never-the-less, she was late too. I'd gotten much quicker at drawing, and the automation helped, but she still took a very long time to finish.

I hate to be a downer, but I did warn you that this would be like a Greek tragedy. It might not have been entirely obvious to anyone on the outside looking in, but there was a dark cloud hanging over this whole mess... I'd been working at it for several months and I only had 3 Champions to show for it... far fewer than the 6 or 7 I'd imagined I'd have released by this point. I also had a real problem getting the Patreon to grow and some folks were leaving with complaints that I wasn't as active as they expected. That seemed like a fair criticism, and I took it as such because it would have looked that way to them. For obvious reasons, they're not going to be reading this, but on the off-chance that one of them does, let me say I'm truly sorry for letting you down!

What people didn't know is that I was slaving away for 10-12 hours a day, every single day including weekends, just trying to make this whole thing work. The Champions Series had accidentally become my whole career. Hell, it had become my whole life... I'd stopped taking on commission work. I'd stopped putting out new content on my shops. I'd also basically abandoned all the marketing efforts that had served me very well before this point.

On the bright side, I was getting much quicker! All of this intensive drawing was really making me much better at it, and consequently I was no longer struggling to draw things.. I'd get things right on the first try more often than not. Before, drawing and colouring each mini would take me about 30 - 40 hours spread over several days, and now I was managing to do it in about 12! I'd also figured a pretty efficient workflow, and was adding automation that reduced hours of grueling, tedious work into single-click tasks.

Unfortunately this all gave me an ill-deserved sense of confidence when I went in to work on the Mountaineer. It takes time to write those scripts, and even though they'd go on to save me a ton of time later, they cost me a lot of time then and slowed me right down. You guessed, it the dwarf was late too... I did get the art done quickly though, and I took that as a good sign for things to come.

Part 3: Reality ensues

I then moved on to the Rascal, another of my favourite Champions. This time I was absolutely certain that I was on top of things. The workflow was efficient, I was drawing quickly and accurately, I had tons of stuff automated and working smoothly... What could go wrong?

Well, as I mentioned just a couple paragraphs ago, I'd been working exclusively on Champions Series stuff and neglecting everything else. Sales were dipping across the board, and I needed to do something about my cash flow to keep covering expenses, so I had to start taking on freelance jobs and commission work and I had to find a way to start making stuff for my shops again, and at this point everything became a very delicate balancing act that I still have not gotten completely right.

Around the time I was working on the Vanquisher, things started to really fall apart. My ancient copy of Acrobat Pro stopped working and so I bit the bullet and subscribed to the Adobe Creative Suite. The problem was that my equally ancient computer wasn't playing nice with the software and so I was stuck trying to get that to work so I could finish up the Vanquisher and get it out. I also couldn't afford to upgrade the ancient computer, so I had to take on a job drawing comics for one of my clients. It paid nice, but it was all too much for the delicate balancing act... That was the first big disaster, but sadly it wasn't the last. The coming months brought Covid-19, lockdowns, endless problems with the power grid, hardware failures and all the other stuff I've filled you in on on my last few update posts.

In conclusion:

I tell you all of this, because in all this time I've been racking my brain trying to work out how to make this all work. Here's the conundrum: Between the automation and my vastly improved artistic ability, I've finally gotten fast enough at it that I could likely do the Champions Series as a monthly thing like I'd originally envisioned, but for that to work, it'd have to be an almost full-time job for me. It can't be a full-time job because it doesn't pay enough to live on, and so I have to do commissions and freelance work and regularly put out new content on my various shops, and also find time and energy to effectively market all of the stuff including the Patreon. I also desperately need to do something about the unhealthy status quo on this Patreon where weeks pass without content or new updates.

It's clear that I need to rethink this whole thing and come up with a better plan if I'm going to continue with it. I'm pleased to tell you that I have done that rethinking and have come up with a plan! Don't worry, that plan doesn't involve the end of the Champions Series as you've come to know and love it. The Champions Series is the whole point of the exercise after all, and besides that, it's only just starting to get good!

The Very Important Announcement!

Don't freak out!

I'm retooling the way this whole thing works and will reword the tiers accordingly. Specifically I'm removing all mentions of the Champions Series as a monthly reward. The Champions Series is not coming to an end. I'll still be working on it and releasing new Champions as regularly as I can manage. While this might look like quite a dramatic overhaul, in practice it's not much of a change at all, since, in spite of my best efforts, I've never been able to keep up the monthly schedule anyway. The current tier structure will remain the same for the time being. This change is about honestly reflecting the nature of this project and creating more accurate expectations.

The monthly bonuses are going away though, and will be replaced by something better. They were an attempt to make up for slow progress on the Champions Series, along with a way to create new content that I could put on my shops to keep the traffic and sales up. Some of them were really fun, and brought some variety to my catalog of minis, but they generally caused more problems than they solved. They weren't released regularly enough to counter the feeling that this Patreon wasn't active. While they were intended to make up for the slow pace of releases, they often just made things even slower by clogging up my to-do list. They were also a dismal failure on the marketing front, doing very little to help grow this Patreon or sell stuff in my shops.

In place of the monthly bonuses, I'm going back to the business model that I mentioned in the story above. Before I started the Patreon, I used to release a free mini every week on the Papercraft Dungeon Facebook page. It was a very effective marketing method that drove a ton of traffic to my shops and generated a lot of sales.

Here's the plan:

• Every Thursday, starting tomorrow, there will be a new mini posted to Patreon as an "early release", meaning that it'll be exclusively available to subscribers for the first week, and available to everyone thereafter.

• Coinciding with the "early access" post going public, I'll post that mini across my social media.

• Every Monday, starting on the 7th of February, there will be a Patreons-only post that will include 2 variants of that mini. Those variants will only ever be available to Patreon subscribers.

• Every 4 weeks, I'll package up the 12 minis released that month as a PDF for easy printing. That PDF will be released to all Patreon subscribers.

• Every two months or so, I'll package up 7 of the publicly available minis as a PWYW set and publish that on DriveThruRPG and papercraftdungeon.com

• Work will continue on the Champions Series at the quickest pace that I can manage. I'll post regular progress updates on the Discord channel to keep you all informed about how it's going.

Now, I'm quite aware that there may be some very understandable skepticism that I can pull this plan off, especially from those of you that actually read that whole unflattering story I just posted. I'm happy to tell you that you can safely put that skepticism aside... I've already scheduled posts for every Thursday and Monday of February, and have enough minis in reserve to schedule releases every week in March! (If you're wondering, why I have so many minis to release, they're a mix of previously unreleased minis, that didn't get packed into other sets because I didn't have enough in a matching theme to fill a set.) I know from experience that I can knock each of these minis out in a single day, so with a buffer that big I should be able to stay on top of things for a long while, even with issues like the dismally unreliable South African power grid.

Well, that's all for now! Thank you for reading this... I hope you're looking forward to this new chapter! I'll leave you with a preview of the first two minis I have lined up for you.