Upcoming projects & future plans (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

This December has been, quite a busy and scary one, so I thought I'd post a little update of why that is and what's ahead!

Thor & Streaming Schedule

Apart from being a busy month in general with the release of Budget Cuts 2 at work, Ashley moving to Sweden, and holiday celebrations and all, our beloved cat Thor got very, very sick. He was on the brink of dying of hepatic lipidosis earlier this month, but, he finally stabilized after a very stressful week. After another week at the vet, he is now home and on a slow path to recovery. That recovery involves us manually feeding him every second hour through an esophagostomy tube in his neck, which means he needs our attention for 15 minutes every 2 hours, which, turns out, is very difficult to fit into a streaming schedule both practically and in terms of mental stress, which is why I haven't been streaming much as of late. Hopefully he'll start eating on his own this coming week, and I can resume my regular schedule

As usual when I have these unexpected breaks happen in my output - feel free to lower or drop your support for a while, if you feel like I haven't been giving you as much as you'd have hoped with your support! On the other hand, Thor's medical bills dug heavily into our savings, so from that perspective your support is extra appreciated right now 💖

Patreon

This might be a little meta and not super interesting to you all, but, transparency is neat and here's some insight if you're curious! This year, I'd really like to push for being able to be entirely funded through here on Patreon, so that I'd be able to do all this full-time! There are a few projects I have some plans for, so here's how things are looking at the moment:

• We currently have ~120 patrons

• Let's assume the same current avg. support per person

• ~800 patrons is the magic number where you'd be able to support my work full-time, which is a hecking dream come true if we get there!

I've now set up a public goal on the page as well, so we can track progress! We're currently about 14% of the way there 📈

I've also considered going 100% public with the exact amount of support I have here, in dollars rather than just the number of supporters, as well as openly showing a chart of the exact path the funding takes all the way through patreon and through taxation and finally into being able to help me pay rent. Including how much I need to get by as well

Do you think this a good idea?

I feel like it's morally good but a financially bad thing to do. As in, I really want to be 100% transparent about all this, but I fear that many who see the exact amount or who can see how much is "lost" in taxes, might get demotivated, and the net result is that growth will be more difficult, and by extension my work will be slowed down.

On the other hand, I love being open and honest! And I think many are curious to see how it works too, but I'm not sure if it's worth it? Do let me know what you think!

Anyway, apart from resuming my game dev streaming as soon as I can, there are a few projects I've been tinkering with, that I want to steer toward helping grow patreon, so here's a little overview!

Freya's book of Math (working title)

I've been posting a bunch of educational math animations and art as of late, and there seems to be a very strong interest in visual ways to show mathematical concepts!

So, I'm now very close to writing a book of math! Online, free and visually interesting, animated book, with game development as a practical use case backdrop for each concept shown

Educational math is generally incredibly dry, and quickly gets bogged down in technicalities rather than visually communicating practical concepts clearly. On top of that, people interested in math are often not really artistically minded, and people artistically minded are often not interested in math. I think I'm in a really good position to do this, and, well, judging by the massively positive reception of these animations on twitter, I know I can do this, I just need to find the time for it!

I've written an outline for all topics I'd like to cover and the goal with the book, which you can read here!

My plan is to write a single chapter, likely the one on trigonometry, then release that for free and push for funding the rest of the book through patreon! Hopefully, given how much traction those tweets have gotten, and how much people have said they'd be interested in funding this book already, I think this might be a great way to both communicate the beauty of math and in a very real way help people with their education, plus, at the same time, find more supporters!

Shapes (working title)

Related to my math animations, I've been writing a vector graphics library in Unity that I've been using to make them! A lot of people have asked how I make them, and how to do vector graphics in Unity in general.

I initially planned to sell it on the Unity asset store, but, I think my plan now instead is to make it exclusive to patrons! Kinda like a, pay-what-you-want-above-$0-subscription! Likely, it won't sell as much, but, I really want this place to be sustainable long-term for my work, and not a short burst of profit. Plus, the asset store doesn't build a community, this place does! And I think that's wonderful <3

Oh and, all of you who are already supporting will of course get access to it too!

Flowstorm & Streaming

Flowstorm has of course paused as my streaming was paused this month. So, I'll get back to it as soon as streaming returns! The status currently is that the game is looking pretty good in terms of functionality, I think we'll soon slowly transition into doing more art this coming year! There are lots of kinks to work out when it comes to networking and some final touches to the level editor though, so we'll see how that goes first! I'm super interested in doing more procedural generation for the levels and such too, so even the art section of its development will likely be pretty tech heavy too!

I've also recently made myself a new year's resolution of learning how to draw! So I might be doing that every now and then on stream, possibly for Flowstorm even, who knows?

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Anyhow, I hope you've had a good christmas, if you celebrate that! I also wish you a happy new year ahead~

Finally, thank you all so much for the support, I'm so hecking lucky I get to even think about doing all this. It really is a dream come true, so thank you thank you thank you!!

Oh, and, in case you don't know, we have a Discord server! Come hang out with us~ ✨

// Freya