Regarding current distribution formats! Lets make a decision! Vote today (Patreon)

Hello and good night!

I've noticed there's a growing frustration with the way Librarium asset are currently being distributed, it is quite a complex topic so let me break it down into 3 parts, How it came to be, How it currently works and  IMMEDIATE actions to take starting next week to remedy this situation.

How it came to be

As you may or may not know, there's an extensive back catalogue of pending work I have been grinding out non-stop for a while now, initially I deviced a super organized post format for each individual release, at the time I called it "Full Release", and it basically featured the entirety of associated assets for the featured monster/monsters for that pack. ( example: https://aekashics.itch.io/librarium-animated-lich-king-draegith  ) While it worked as a massive step forward in how our community was downloading assets as soon as they came to be, I felt I needed to release even more of that pending and concurrent content at an even faster rate, and the creation of the marketing materials and individual post contents was proving to be a task eating up time which I felt could be more valuable for our community  to be used in the creation of even more of that gamedev assets, this is how we arrived at the "Compilation megathreads" you currently see.

How it currently works

The goal is relatively simple, i.e creating all the pending content I have been grinding at. To arrive at it and have tangible results out as soon as they existed, I decided to "hyper-focus" in creating an specific asset type first, and compiling them all in a massive, constantly updated "megathreads, for instance the 4direction map sprite mega thread, then the portrait megathread,  and lastly, an animated battler megathread. concurrently, the monsters for the running month would be in their own megathreads when it came to the static designs, with their eventual associated map sprites and other content to be distributed in the already existing megathreads, to keep things contained.

Broken down in further detail,  My logic in having "bulk" "Megathreads" served 2  primary objectives:

The first one, To Create assets at a much faster rate and have them available as soon as they come to exist

The second one, with all the pieces of the content puzzle now created AND available, start organizing and posting in complete, individual releases, just like the full release format which already was in place back in November 2022

In the first aspect, I feel this approach was proving to be a massive success, for instance since I began with this work plan, just in March alone I completed around Thirty-six 4-direction map sprites, many of them massive in size, and would have problably actually gotten closer to 50 completed, had I not encountered a dire situation which made me slow down in the last 2  weeks of March  (A situation now resolved by the way), but the point stands that this approach was indeed letting me blaze through the content as expected.

In paper it indeed felt like it worked well in my eyes,  We had a compilation thread for everything 4-direction map sprite, we would eventually have one for everything Bust portrait, and then one for everything animated, while also having our polls running smoothly and the static battlers for the featured month in a thread of their own, per month. Eventually, with all the pieces completed, I would assemble all the individual releases and post them, complete with their itch.io binding keys.

Yes, in paper and technically in practice, I thought it was ideal and working, but It came with a heavy cost I didn't anticipate, however;

Given the time period required to clear the asset list, The effect in the perception of organization  and confusion as to what was being created, what was new or what wasn't, or perhaps even the lack of a CLEAR guideline on how the current (and temporal) distribution is working out, which admittedly, was explained over a string of several previous posts, making it harder to be in the loop. Tracking down posts was also proving to be confusing and frustrating, and redownloading the same file over and over turned out to have an impact in efficiency for our community when extracting the new assets.

What we're going to do about it

The current plan, and the one which seems that will enable me to break out of the catch up hell and continue delivering tangible content constantly feels to be this one, the problem is that it would probably extend the current dristribution format for at least and realistically another 3 months, since as soon as I'm done with the 4dir map sprite mega grind, I would jump to the portrait grind, and then the animated grind. (All of them released in their own megathreads just like the 4dir map sprites). I feel the quality and output rate somewhat lessen the blow in lack of organization represents , but I also totally understand the frustration this approach brings, so it more or less boils down to something our community must decide; wether we trust this process or not.

I'm thinking perhaps I can restructure the directory thread or change the pinned labels system  to reflect the current nature on how stuff is being worked on and released as well, perhaps that would clear up a lot of the current confusion,

the most important thing to keep in mind though, is that these megathreads were meant to be only temporary, they are not here to stay, and I'm also super interested in moving out of them as soon as possible and return to organized, individual posts, but I feel they took the form of a "neccesary evil" right now.

Or we can go back to individual full release posts starting next week, if that's what our community prefers,it would signify the end of the megathreads and I would basically go back through the 4-dirs already made and pick up from there to start building the full release packs and posts and created the pending assets for them as it applies! good news regardless of the decisions is that someone will be working closely with me starting next week as well, they will be helping me with the management/marketing side of things, I will still be the one creating all the graphical content, answering your messages and questions, but they will help me stay on track and organized, and also with the marketing material creation aspect. There might be a bit of a learning curve period while I tune the synergy and organization with this person however!

Primarily I want it to be understood and seen that your concerns matter to me and everyone is being listened, Librarium isn't neglected nor abandoned, The quality of the assets is the best it has ever been, and that's here to stay, right now it's just a matter of collectively deciding how we want to tackle pending stuff thatis already in the works as well!

Let us decide for the rest of this week what we want to do! In the meantime I'll still be creating assets, they are needed regardless of the outcome of the decision!

as always, thanks for your support!