Big life update & pausing pledges for a bit

Hey everyone!! Sorry that I was quiet this month - a lot of real life stuff has been happening to me recently, and I've needed a lot of time to process it. But now my life is heading in a new (good!!) direction, and I want to be transparent about what's going on, since it impacts you guys and the schedule of what I'm doing on here.

So... at the behest of a furry friend, at the start of February I took a vacation to Austin to clear my head a bit... and through a series of connections and coincidences, I got a job at a game studio!! What?? Yeah, I know. Let's talk about it.

I really haven't said much about my physical life before, but I think opening up a bit about it would provide some useful context for how / why all of this happened.

Almost exactly a year ago (March 2019), I was still in college, working an unrelated QA internship, and also just starting to post my work online after years of being closeted. Around that time, I started working on ottergame, the first videos of which got very noticed very quickly on Twitter. It felt really good, but also kind of scary (in that stage fright way where all of a sudden a lot of people are looking at you.)

That summer was my last semester of college. I graduated in August 2019, without a job lined up or any real Connections™ in the game industry, which I had been trying to get into. I did have otter though, and I liked it and kept working on it, eventually launching this Patreon in September 2019 as some of you probably know.

I've pretty much just... been living at home since, chiseling away at this game while being essentially unemployed, and hoping that at some point I'd become financially independent off of my work / garner the means to move out and live an adult life. I thought about doing freelance dev work or art commissions, but never really got the ball rolling on either. I also got more than a few publisher / investor offers for the game, all of which I declined or delayed (despite money!) because I felt like it was too early to make those kinds of promises.

I'll be completely honest - it hasn't felt great. Staking my nebulous future entirely on how good this game is, how much attention it gets on Twitter, and how quickly I can make it playable has not been good for my mental health or my creativity. I've just been putting too many eggs in one basket.

I've been keeping most of these feelings to myself, both because I genuinely want to be a positive person online, and also because it seems kind of gross and unprofessional to whine at the people who are literally giving you money to make your art. I want to reiterate how grateful I am that this many people even care about my stuff to begin with, and as my physical life changes / improves, I still want to make things online and be a general resource for gamedev questions and stuff. Getting to know some of you and hanging out in our little Discord community has by far been the best part of doing this.

So yeah - almost unintentionally, I met some people on my vacation and got a job at a game studio that is a really, really good fit for me. To be clear - this isn't the end of otter. I can keep working on personal stuff at my new job (I would not have accepted an offer if that weren't the case) and I still want to release a playable demo. With the additional income, I can even think about contracting other artists to help finish it. And in general, I think that decoupling my financial independence from my personal work will allow me to have a much healthier relationship with what I make, otter or otherwise.

All that said - I am now moving to Austin (!!) and my real life is going to be pretty busy for the next few months. I doubt I will have much time to work on stuff for a while, and I don't really feel like making people pay for content I'm not making, so I paused pledges for March (i.e. nobody will be charged tomorrow) and I will probably pause April as well. I'll let you guys know when I feel ready to post stuff again, and might switch over to doing pay-per-post or just posting stuff for free. Not sure yet.

As always, thank you for all the kindness and support you've given me these past months. It has meant the world to me at an otherwise very uncertain time in my life, and I can't wait to start this next chapter.

TL;DR - I got a job at a game studio!! I still want to make my own stuff in my own time / release an otter demo for you guys, but for the next few months I will be preoccupied with moving, so I'm pausing pledges for now. Once I'm settled in I'll reevaluate what I want to do with this Patreon. Thank you again for all the support you've given me.