Progress update & Feedback request

Hi everyone,

I wanted to write a little progress update. I've been told that I'm not as active as some would like, so I wanted to at least keep you appraised on what I'm working on.

Since I can't ever seem to figure out how to write a short post, here's the TLDR for those who have a short attention span :

• If you have any feedback for me, let me know
• You can vote in this poll for which projects you'd like me to concentrate my time on
• I'm still working on Arcane Viewing, making some good but slow progress.
• I will then work on Beyond20, then R20Converter.
• I have some cool plans for a new project that I want to keep secret for now but hope everyone will love once it's announced.
• Thank you for supporting my work!

Feedback

First of all, the month of October has been less good for me when it comes to patron subscriptions. Since I started in June, I've had almost double the patron revenue from the previous month until last month where it was actually lower. Some of those who unsubscribed filled the exit survery and other than one "not as active as I thought", most of them were either about the patron's financial situation changing or the simple fact that patrons subscribed to get a specific perk (R20Converter I would assume) and once they got it, they unsubscribed as they had planned. 

That's not only expected but reasonable and I obviously understand that, but I'm also wondering if there is some other actual feedback that I could get, from you my patrons. So I'm asking, if you have any thoughts or feedback on what you'd like to see from me, if there's something you think I'm not doing right or that I am doing right and want me to keep doing, etc.. Please feel free to contact me (comment here or on Discord if you prefer) and share your thoughts.

Patreon is important to me, and even more so now as I'm finishing up my last work contract and Patreon will become my main source of revenue by the end of the month (was supposed to be by end of last month, but I got another month extension on my contract). The first months were exhilarating, seeing the linear progression of patrons, almost had one new pledge per day for the whole of September, then in October it stalled, then dropped and it was pretty sad and I didn't manage to climb back to the same numbers as at the start of the month. I suppose it might be that I had just reached the peak of where I should be, and 50 patrons, 200$/month is what it should be and the earlier months, it was just playing catch up :)

Here's the graph patreon provides by the way, for those of you who are curious to see what it looks like :

Poll about my projects 

The second thing I want to talk about is the poll in the current post. I have been doing a lot of cool stuff but unfortunately, the number of different projects I need to manage is a little disorienting. I can't multitask, I'm absolutely lousy at it, so I do one thing at a time then switch to another project, and once I'm done handling all my projects and go back to the start of the list, projects go a long time with no updates. I give pretty much equal time to everything (unless there's nothing to be done), but I think it would be better to see what people actually care about. So this poll is about which projects you would want me to focus more on, so that when I have a choice, I chose a project my patrons are interested in. 

Note that, to me, doing something new is always more fun and more interesting than maintaining something I already wrote, because I like challenging stuff. Also from a purely 'financial business' perspective : Beyond20 now has over 7500 users, so updates to it do bring a lot of attention to me with the update notes and may incite people to subscribe here (hopefully). Also, R20Converter is a popular project which is probably how most people here first learned of my patreon and subscribed to it in order to get access to it. Of course, I also understand that once you converted your campaigns, you would probably not care so much about it anymore.

Progress Update

Now on to the progress updates. Last month was particularly interesting as I've worked a lot on R20Converter. For what was supposed to be a couple of days of work ended up being a couple of weeks of work because I had underestimated the task. I also worked on a new project that I want to keep a surprise for now but I hope that everyone will like and cheer when I announce it. After that, @errational asked some questions on discord about how webrtc worked and it launched me into working on Arcane Viewing. I enjoyed it a lot and I'm very happy that it's working so smoothly, but while the alpha became a beta,  it's not yet good enough in my opinion to be called 'final', so I've been working on that for the two weeks now.

My current work on Arcane Viewing has been two fold, first, I needed to review what I'd done, redesign things a little then start refactoring the code. I have a tendency to get things working quickly because I work quite fast at solving challenging problems, but the fact that "it works', doesn't mean "it's ready", so a lot of work has to follow to make it cleaner and more robust. I also tend to do a lot of testing and try to cover most use cases and all corner cases I can think of. Unfortunately, with A/V calls, it's a bit harder to do that when you can't test over a wide range of router configurations or with remote machines. Another reason A/V work has been slow going is because I had to deal with a lot of HTML and CSS work,  not just pure logic code, and I'm simply inept at UI design, so it can take me 3 hours just to get a simple button placed in the right position. I hate CSS.

After releasing the beta last week, I took a couple of days to rest and redesign the implementation a bit. I've then started tackling the bugs that were reported to me by those who managed to test Arcane Viewing. I've fixed most of those (just need to handle connectivity issues and connection drops) and found new ones which I've also mostly fixed. I then cleaned up and refactored the UI implementation, hopefully to have it integrated into FVTT core as I've done in the past with the drawing tools. This kind of work takes a lot of time but yields very little visible changes in terms of new features, but on the longer term, it will be good for the project.

Oh, I also wrote polyglot after someone asked if such a feature was possible in discord. It's a module that lets you specify which language you speak when chatting in character in FVTT and scrambles the text to anyone who doesn't have a character that understands that language. I had decided to make that into a separate module (like I did with Arcane Viewing) rather than put it into my Furnace 'mega-module' because I want to keep Furnace focused on quality of life improvements and small things. If the addition could be seen as a feature in and of itself, then it deserves a separate module.. which of course, only makes things more difficult for me since I have one more thing to manage now :(

Speaking of things to manage, I said earlier that I'm bad at multitasking, this means also that whenever I chat on FVTT's discord channels, I will often be focused on chatting and be unable to do much of anything else. I've realized it this week and I've started dialing down the attention I give FVTT's discord (I still keep an eye on my own discord, or if someone highlights my name, I will always check and respond). While I enjoy talking to everyone and helping others in the chat, I think that I need to stop (or dial back as much as possible) as it is affecting how much time I can spend concentrating on work.

One last thing, I've also been working on doing some more outlining for my novel. Using the 7-point plot structure has helped me immensely and I believe I found the holes in the first part of the story, and it allowed me to change things drastically for the better. If you're curious about the 7 point plot structure, here's a video of Dan Wells doing a lecture about it (in 5 parts, and the annoying music at the beginning only lasts a few seconds) It shouldn't mean too much of the already written text is thrown out, but I am redoing the main plot of my second character basically so I will need to do rewrite some chapters. With NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) that started on November 1st, I've been trying to spend at least an hour per day on writing and I started back at chapter 1. I'm not specifically doing NaNoWriMo  as the rules/spirit of it is to write a 50k words novel from scratch and I had already started on mine (and it's also much larger than 50k words), but I'm using it as a way to motivate myself to write. Let's cross fingers and hope I can at least finish Part 1 by the end of the month :)

Future work

After I'm done with Arcane Viewing, I plan on working on my super-secret project and/or Beyond20 first. I've received a few interesting feature requests for Beyond20 and it's probably time to implement those and make a release, then after that, I have to go back to R20Converter. Port it to the new 0.3.9 schema (or 0.4.0 most probably as I expect that to be out by then), add support for the rollable tables, and release that. We'll see what I'll do next, probably will depend heavily on this poll's results. 

That's about it, thanks for reading all of this, and thanks again for everyone who supported me month after month. I hope none of you are disappointed and I hope I can keep delivering things everyone will enjoy.

Thanks!

KaKaRoTo