Pivot and announcement (Patreon)

Sorry for the extended absence.  The people stalking me started sharing my address, right around the time they were convincing a lot of bystanders to be very angry at me, and I've seen that kind of situation go very badly, so I had to sell my house.  It's been a complicated few months.  How's your summer going?

Under these circumstances, I feel compelled to make a few changes.

Weekly and monthly roundups will not continue for the foreseeable future.  I hate this, because I really did love being candid and open about everything I was doing… but with some very creepy people breathing down my neck, I'm not so excited about the idea of talking about myself in great detail.

I'm still off Twitter, except for linking new stuff there.  I haven't checked my notifications or looked at tweet replies for almost three months.  (Sorry if I've missed any kind words — I appreciate them regardless.)  Honestly, I think this is good for me anyway; Twitter kept me up to date on every bad thing happening at all times and rewarded me the most for biting snark, and that is not the ideal kind of ecosystem.  And it's still a fantastic platform for dogpiling, which I just can't take any more of.

The higher (serious) tiers are going away.  Paying me to do a specific thing doesn't seem like a great idea right now.  Also, I don't know yet what's happening with the $6 Anise tier, but I'll definitely make up for lost time one way or another.

But now, the good news! 🎉

I'm going to write more in-depth writeups about stuff I'm working on, as a sort of replacement for both Twitter and weekly roundups.  People seem to like seeing where I struggle and how I get past it, so I might as well document it more, in a space without a character limit.

I'd like to focus primarily on one or two big things I'm doing at a time, so that there are arcs of posts following the development of several big things.  idchoppers is one candidate, so my last post about geometry and Rust would begin the idchoppers arc.  Imagine reading a lot more stuff like that.

As another example…  oh, gosh, I don't even know if I should be talking about this yet, but I'm making a game for a bleeding-edge game console!  It's tentatively named the "Game Boy Color" and it can show more than 50 colors at a time.  I'm going to push it to its limits as I try to make Star Anise Chronicles: Cheezball Rising, an expansive adventure game about my cat, inspired by Oracle of Ages/Seasons.

Now, my dev kit hasn't arrived yet.  I'm sure Nintendo will be shipping it out any second now, but until then, I'll have to make do with a bunch of free stuff I found on the Internet.  And you can follow along as I figure out how the hell to get anything done!

Plus: $4 patrons will finally actually get something, in the form of regular prebuilt ROMs which you don't even have to delete after 24 hours.  They'll leak to the general public a week later, so that's a full seven days of early access!  For a Game Boy Color game!!  Exciting!!!

I'm hoping this will establish a pattern that I can continue with other similarly-large projects (and also encourage me to finish some).  I'll try to think of ways to make some larger tiers that aren't just goofy jokes, too, and I'm definitely open to suggestions.  Or maybe I should shake up the tiers regularly to match my current Big Thing?