Doodley Lore Part 1: The Old Patreon
Added 2023-01-26 07:35:12 +0000 UTCHello! This is the first in a series of “lore” posts that talk about some of the projects I've done in the past. Behind the scenes for things that aren't Doodley related, basically!
I hope you find them interesting. Let me know what you think in the Discord channel or comments.
This first post is about the “old” Patreon. I figured it was the best place to start considering we're on the "new" Patreon now.
When getting the Patreon setup, I completely forgot my old Patreon would still be here. This is what it looked like:
Back in 2019, I had just graduated college and was looking for work. Right after wrapping up some summer camp teaching jobs, I was doing two things simultaneously: An internship at Planet Nutshell (great studio!) and working at Trader Joe's in order to pay the bills.
This didn't leave me with a lot of time and energy for personal art -- something that would continue for a lot longer than I expected.
But I had amassed a decent Twitter following from posting behind the scenes work from Maplewood, as well as my Rhythm Heaven Reanimated scenes being previewed on the official Twitter.
So, I didn't really have the time or energy to do any big projects soon, but I could write about previous projects and go behind the scenes on all of it. It was all doing well on Twitter after all!
In addition to that, in college I put together the first tiny, miniscule bits of a game I've wanted to make for a long time.
It was just a room I put together for a class project, but it taught me a lot about Unity. I was also really driven by this idea of drawing objects and backgrounds in 2D, and then literally converting the 2D assets to 3D. It's a cool look I'm still a big fan of -- I'll get more in-depth with this stuff another time.
Anyways, at that time I figured that Patreon was a decent solution to all of this. It could be a mix of behind-the-scenes posts (what drives interest) and slow but assured devlogs of this game (what I really wanted to work on.)
My hope was that the behind the scenes post would get people in the door, while this game would strike enough interest in people that I could focus on it more, alongside whatever freelance/commissions I needed to pay the bills.
It seemed like a good idea, and I felt like I had the audience for it!
As I was about to learn, however, getting people from one website to another is very very hard.
I kind of learned this already with Maplewood's release, in a way. Any behind the scenes work I posted from Maplewood gained a lot of traction on Twitter, but getting people to actually watch the film was very difficult. The film had double digit views on Youtube for nearly an entire year. Social media is designed to keep people on a website, after all.
So naturally, getting your Twitter following to Patreon was also very difficult. While posting behind-the-scenes work on Twitter and getting traction from it felt very natural for me, pointing everyone to another website felt impossible.
It unfortunately created a vicious cycle where, because I was busy with two jobs, I had little time left to myself to make personal art. No time for personal art meant nothing for the Patreon, outside behind the scenes of content that already had it's time in the limelight.
That ended up causing me quite a bit of stress for a platform that was also pulling away work that I could have posted to Twitter and grow my following.
So it ended up feeling somewhat pointless -- I had some amazing friends who supported me at the time, but otherwise the project was pretty much a failure. The old Patreon puttered for a year, with several months paused because I had nothing to show for the month. I was just too busy with projects for other people, rather than my own work I could post. Not fun!
The final nail in the coffin was when I did my Game Grumps Animated in 2020. I figured it might be a good vehicle to get people in the door, with a lot of new eyes on my work.
But for Youtube end cards, you can only link people to other parts of Youtube. Again, social media wants to keep you on their own website only. So it was a decent boon for Maplewood, and some more traction for Twitter, but not much else.
I'm not sure why I didn't point to my Patreon at the end of this video, I think by this point I knew it wasn't gonna last. I remember posting behind the scenes work on Patreon, but I don't think it was much, and I posted more on Twitter instead.
It is what it is! It was always an awkward fit with what I did at the time, with less of a purpose than I thought. Lesson learned. I still had a lot to figure out with social media strategies and personal branding.
Also I started receiving a lot more freelance work in 2020, enough to live off it full-time! That would also somewhat be my undoing as I accepted way too much freelance for the next couple years, but that's a story for another time.
Ultimately, I wanted to tell this tale to show that, while Doodley as a channel grew very very quickly, I had a lot of failures and things to figure out to get there. This is a point I want to stress all the time -- I believe a lot of the channel's success is in the lessons learned by failing along the way. Simplify your branding. Have a unique idea and identity. Relate to your audience. Understand your platform. Give people a reason to check your stuff out.
Anyways, let's end with something fun. You may be curious as to what was on the Patreon. Here are two of them:
2D and 3D Texture Painting Tutorial
That's right -- I've always been in that tutorial game, baby! These are pretty old, and I'd do them a bit differently now. But I think they're a fun treat for anyone curious.
The rest of the Patreon posts were largely behind the scenes stuff that I'll get into sometime on this Patreon. I hope you look forward to it.
Next time, I'll talk a little bit more about the game that Patreon was partially focused on. It was part of a much larger project I've been noodling with on and off for nearly a decade. You may remember the character below from the Gimberly video! It's something I've been very attached to for a long-time, so I hope people are interested!
- Doodley
