Life Update & Project Transparency

Hey everyone,

Apologies in advance as this isn’t my usual type of post.

I try to keep my day-to-day life private from this project, but I wanted to share a bit of context as it may have a knock-on effect on update speed after the Hikes mini-update.

I started this project around two years ago, working on it off and on as a personal endeavour, unsure if it would ever see the light of day. Earlier this year, I devoted more focus to it because things weren’t looking great at my day job — I was consistently getting less work and was secretly filling my downtime with this game, all while worrying about the possibility of losing my job.

The week before I first posted A Hair Loss Treatment to TFGames, I learned that redundancies were coming. I set up a Patreon and posted for the first time, hoping that the project I’d worked on for so long could provide a little support, and your response completely blew me away.

Long story short, the week I posted the spa update on Patreon and went to visit family, I had been made redundant and needed their support after an incredibly stressful and difficult departure.

For the first time in my adult life, I am unemployed. I received a small redundancy package, enough to cover a couple of months, but as the main breadwinner in my household with a partner and kids, this is obviously a challenging time.

I want to be clear: this is not me e-begging — that’s not something I would ever do.

I’m already shocked every day by how many patrons I have, and it genuinely makes my day when I get notified of new members and see how generous the support has been — far more than I ever realistically expected. I just wanted to let a community that has welcomed me so warmly know that update speed might be affected because of my situation. Between working on my CV, portfolio, and job applications, any future job I find could also take up more time than my previous one. There are a lot of unknowns right now, but my game projects will always be there as a source of stress relief, and as long as you’re interested, I will always find time to add to them.

As it is now there is very little left to do on the Hikes so hopefully paid members will be able to enjoy that by the end of next week. Progress went quickly without a day job getting in the way, but I can’t stay unemployed forever and need to start the job seeking process.

The dream is to eventually make this project a part or full-time thing. I know some similar creators make more on Patreon in a week than I did in a month at my old job, but it’s still very early days for my project being live, so I’m nowhere near that yet — maybe one day, who knows.

For now, I just want to thank you all for your support and understanding. Your encouragement means the world, and I hope it makes sense why things might move a little more erratically than planned.

— Project.Mahila