Weekly Update - 131

Let's all welcome Josh Stam coming to join us all in Kuserra! Thank you so much for subscribing!  Almost missed it because you've been a follower for so long, Patreon didn't consider you a "new" patron, so it didn't put you at the top of my list. I caught the notification yesterday though, so welcome!

Comic this week? Nope. I spent this week working on Max, so no comic this week. Max isn't quite ready juuust yet, but he's very close. The goal is to get him up on the Character Page very soon!

Patreon Rewards: I'm very close to refactoring the Patreon reward tiers, and I want to talk a bit about what that means because I've been thinking about it for awhile now. Currently the higher tiers are unsustainable, and unscalable, and it's felt overwhelming to me for a long time now, even with the small number of Patrons we've got. I can't keep up with the number of character sheets I owe people at the rate I'm going, and if I gain any more Patrons any faster than we're already gaining them, I will very quickly drown in the queue of the bonus work it generates. What's worse, the bigger that queue is, the more I find myself dreading to check on it or work on it. It's sad to admit that, because I actually LIKE seeing and drawing other people's characters from time to time, but when it comes to working on a character sheet for one person or working on a comic for everyone to enjoy, I find myself orbiting the latter and repeatedly deprioritizing the former. It was, perhaps, a mistake, from the very start, to promise character sheets for everyone at the higher tiers. Truth told, when setting up the rewards initially, I never expected to get the kind of support I'm getting (IE. Any).

There'll be an announcement coming soon, but the plan for now is that Squatter and Scavenger tiers will be unchanged, Trader and Redtail tiers will still get regular cameos, and Landlords will still get cameos and keep all their in-universe holdings. Mostly I'll just be cutting out the bonus arts, sketches and character sheets, and moving forward, it'll probably be more of an opt-in sort of deal for characters, so I don't have to chase people down to get references or force people to make characters from scratch if they don't have one ready. The biggest thing is that I just can't keep offering full-color character sheets any more. For one thing, it costs me a lot of time, and for another, I feel like most of my patrons would rather I just work on the comic anyway.

To those of the $10 tier and higher, you're still going to be eligible for everything I've promised you up to this point even after I change the rewards. And that includes if you decide to reduce your pledge or unsubscribe, because I think it'd be totally unfair to require you to be a current subscriber if it's taking me six months or more to get around to delivering a reward. Those of you who are on the queue right now are GETTING the rewards I've promised you, even if you change your pledge for any reason. I'm just sorry I'm so slow. The point of changing up the rewards is just to curb the potential tide of future work.

In any case, since I haven't OFFICIALLY pulled the trigger on this yet, now's a great time to ask questions or voice concerns, but honestly, seeing how bad I've been at delivering character sheets already, I don't expect much to change except that I will have a more scalable reward queue that I will be able to manage with less stress going forward.

Volume #1: Still in the works!  Got the green light from my publisher to keep going ahead with what I'm doing, so I'ma keep doing it.  Again, hoping to get the book out probably early next year.  There's still a lot of work for me to do, since I'm touching up every page for a little more cleanliness and consistency, but I hope to get more work done on that at a faster rate soon.

Drawing: Page 151, Reward Queue (Shit, it's about time)

Playing: Gunfire Reborn

Ye Olde Ramble:

Yeah, I dunno. I don't know what I'm doing.  I never have, and I probably never will. But that's okay cuz I'ma just keep doing things and hope that it all works out. Mistakes will be made along the way, time and time again, but that's okay too because hopefully I can learn something from each one.

I know that I wanna make a game someday. A TTRPG, set in Kuserra, where players can make whatever characters they want and explore wherever they want and where players can choose to play as gods or as god hunters or... perhaps... be both? All while trying to survive in an awful, hopeless, and very dangerous world. Now, before anyone gets overhyped, this is a long, long term goal. Still many years away. Merely a concept for now.

But an RPGish style idea was, I think, the original goal of how I set up the Patreon rewards. I wanted to bring people's characters into my world and help it to feel lived in and alive. I think I imagined I could sort of parttime lightweight lowkey GM for a modest community of players. I think I overestimated how much of that I would want to actually do, however, and underestimated how much of my time would be taken up by just drawing and writing comics. Now, I want to be clear, I'm not complaining about the past. I've enjoyed the discussions I've had with people about their characters and finding roles to slot them into the world. Those who I've spoken to have had their characters added to the canon of the world, and I still enjoy thinking about what they might be doing, when and where they might show up in the background of Kiva's story, and what other characters they might be found interacting with. Some of you have surprised me with characters that fit beautifully into the world, while some have thrown me for a bit of a loop and forced me to consider things I never would have thought about on my own. Kuserra is the sort of place where outcasts and misfits should be the norm.

But the way that my Patreon rewards are set up now isn't doing what I had hoped, I think. For the most part, it's worked out fine, you guys are awesome.  But it's happened a couple of times where someone thinks they are paying me to allow their character to become the star of the comic, or that they are buying a role in the story, and that's really not a thing I've ever offered nor ever intended to offer. I'm not here on Patreon to sell anything. I just wanted a way to allow people to show me that they support what I'm doing and that they want it to continue. The rewards like cameos are just there as a way for me to thank you for that support, and most people get that, I think, but when someone doesn't understand the premise from the start, I don't know how to explain it to them in no uncertain terms without coming across like a huge jerk.

So, I think, a way of solving the problem for the short term is to reduce and reword the Patreon rewards, while thinking more seriously about making a TTRPG for the very long term. The comic will be its own contained story, while the potential of a future game will be intended to be more of an ongoing, persistent story of greater scope and scale. Big things are coming, eventually, for God Slayers and for Kuserra in general, and the more time I can free up to work on them, the better they will be.