About Tiers with Art Rewards + Commissions (Please Read) (Patreon)

Today I have bad news for people who are in the tiers with monthly and tri-monthly rewards. First I'll give the tl;dr version of it, and then I'll go in depth as to why I am making this decision.

The TL;DR Version

Effective immediately, I am ending the tiers with the monthly and tri-monthly art rewards. People who are in the middle of their tri-monthly cycle can stay in their tier until their reward is up, but it will be the last time the reward will be available. People who are currently aligned with the tri-monthly cycle will no longer get art rewards after this. 

If you're not sure, want to find out your reward status, or have questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to me! If you swap out of your existing tier into a different one, I'll take that as you agreeing to what I say here. If you swap out of your existing tier and you're still building up toward the next reward, I'll take that to mean that you don't want the reward anymore. Again, please contact me if you have any questions!

Thank you for your continued support, and I appreciate you guys for supporting me. Now I can put more details into why I'm making this decision, as well as talk about the future of commissions in general.

The Dream

When I started offering the monthly and tri-monthly art rewards, the idea was simple: I could have some other stuff to work on between other commissions, provide more rewards on my Patreon, and have a reliable flow of art to do for people. It seemed like an easy idea to reward people. I figured, especially with the tri-monthly aspect of it, I would have a nice, casual pace at which to do art for people.

The Problem

There were several problems with this idea, not just for me, but for Patrons as well. Here are some of the problems (though I will get into the main one later.) For one, people who signed up to the art tiers were having difficulty even coming up with that many ideas at that pace. Also, I know that I'm not the only artist out there, and people want to commission other artists, but now they're in this Patreon pledge thing with me and maybe they feel bad for stepping out of it?

The main issue, however, is for me and the concept of the Never-ending Queue.

The Never-ending Queue

The thing I like to do with the commissions is work on them in batches. I like to be able to say "ok, here is this group of commissions that I need to do" and set a goal for me to do them by, and feel satisfied with completing them. With the way the Patreon art rewards are set up though, it just results in artwork constantly entering the queue. Did something happen that made it so I couldn't work on art as much one month? Did I release a Shield Cat build and it had a million bugs that I had to fix right away? Well, the cycle continues and I still have to do the art reward for the next month.

(A note: these are both situations that have arisen, and is part of the reason I'm behind on art.)

When I get behind in any way, then the artwork starts stacking up. I already haven't really taken commissions for months because it was starting to stack up, and I really don't like it when the art stacks like that. I don't have an amazingly long commission queue right now, but I'd really like to keep it that way. I don't want to end up like one of these people on Artists Beware who owes like 200 artworks.

When you have the perpetual queue, it also means you're perpetually behind if you fall behind even once. I can't do the artwork in batches anymore, because artwork will just slide in from the side. I'm not trying to blame anyone for this, I set myself up for this one. All of this adds up together to make me feel really discouraged about doing the art, and I haven't really been drawing as much lately as a result of it. It just feels like it's never-ending, and it's difficult to go in and feel confident about doing it, when you know that there's just gonna be more later.

Goals and Working In General

The whole thing just leads into the concept of working toward a goal. When I was talking it over with some friends, someone asked about the difference between this and Shield Cat. The difference is that, with Shield Cat, there is a clearly defined goal (several, in fact.) I know what I'm doing and working toward, and I know what I'll be doing in the future and roughly how long it'll take me to do it. Without the ability to set up commissions in batches, it means that I can't really work toward a goal.

I think the whole thing ties back to just how I've been feeling about commissions in general lately. It's probably unwise to talk about this in front of everyone, but I need to talk about it at some point, and I've already been putting off ending the art rewards anyways, so I might as well just put it out there: I don't want to do commissions anymore. I will continue to do commissions for the time being, because drawing art for people, working on the game, and generous donations from people online currently make up the entirety of my income. So yea, I kinda have to do it.

When I was talking about it with friends, I likened it to when I was working in food service. What is the ultimate goal here? I am just doing one-off artwork for people, and sometimes there are repeat clients, and that's really cool. But ultimate, I don't really feel like there's a goal with it. I suppose the goal would be to become one of those popufurs with 50k followers on Twitter or whatever, but like, then what?

I think that could be the goal, become a well known furry artist, maybe go to conventions and sell merch, etc. but honestly, it doesn't really interest me all that much. I am more interested in working on my game, and my ideal goal is to either get enough Patrons or secure funding through other means for the game, so that I can spend more time working on it. The goal would be to come out with a game that many people all across the world enjoy, or maybe only a few people enjoy it, but they can all enjoy what I've done and think it's really cool, and I can go on and make another game. This goal is much more appealing to me.

I'm not trying to say I want to become the next Toby Fox or something, far from it. I don't expect the game to ever take off in that kind of capacity, but that's not the important part. The important part is making something that people can enjoy and have fun with, and engage with the game and tell me about their experience with it (good or bad.) This is where my heart is, and I have to be true to my heart and, if I'm keeping it 100 with everyone reading this, well, art just doesn't do that for me as much.

Don't get me wrong: I love working with people to bring their characters and ideas to life. People have brought me some interesting and wonderful characters to draw, and I make the vision in their head real, and it's a very fun process. I've worked with some great people and drawn some great artworks. But the thing is like, I've done about 600+ at least commissions, requests, prizes, and whatnot for all kinds of people in all kinds of ways, and at this point, I'm just like: what's next? It sure is a lot better than food service (people are a lot nicer when they commission me than they were there) but also, it just doesn't feel too dissimilar in the end.

This is not to say that there's no point to doing commissions. There are people who have moved on to doing work at professional studios with their art that came from working on commissions. There's goals there, and there's things you can do. But it's not just for me. After all this time trying out all these different things, like trying to be an artist, a web programmer, a video creator, a comic maker, a pixel artist, and more - I just like making games. I just like to write the code and make the little guy move on the screen, or figure out how to store data in weird json files. This is what interests me. My end goal would be to eventually work with others on either this game or some other game, and I feel like it would be much more enjoyable to do that.

The Point

This post is getting really off topic now, but it's just some stuff I've been talking about anyways, so I just wanted to get it off my chest. I think the point is just that, I don't want to do commissions anymore, and the first step is ending the art rewards for Patrons. I feel bad because I feel like setting up the art reward was like a promise that I could do it, and now I'm breaking that promise, but honestly I've just been putting this off for a while. I already hid the tiers a while back so that nobody else could sign up to them, and I've been doing my best, but it just hasn't been good enough - as evidenced by the fact that I'm really behind on owed art.

The fact of the matter is, I started really thinking about this a couple days ago, and I started getting excited about doing art again. Excited about the prospect of seeing the end of it, of looking at my Trello and going "Yea, I can do this for these people and get it done in this amount of time." It's already been feeling less hopeless, and who knows, maybe it'll lead into me doing more art than I was doing before. But yea, that is in the future, and I already declared my eventual goals above, so I just want to talk it one day at a time and work on my existing owed art before thinking about anything else.

And it's not that I don't want to do the art - I do! But it's just been very discouraging, and I realized that I've just had a negative relationship with working on art lately, because I feel like any time that I'm drawing anything is time that I could be drawing the commission instead. If I'm being honestly, I think I've just been using the game development as deflection to try to avoid having to deal with this whole commission queue issue, because it's just easier to put something cool in the game, go "Hey guys I couldn't work on your commission because I put this in the game," and everyone goes "wow roxy that's cool, you're very smart, take as much time as you need." But it's not right, and I'm tired of it.

Conclusion

I want to get this commission queue done, and I want to get it done soon. I am planning on the Shield Cat demo in the fall, and I want to go into it with an empty Trello so I can put my entire focus into people's reactions to the game, fixing any issues that arise, or listening to praise from anyone who plays the game and wants to shower me with complements. I want to focus on that, and I also want to get the commissions done because some of them have been waiting a while.

I also understand that, maybe some of this falls under time management issues. I will admit I've been having a hard time balancing game development and working on art, but I also know that those are personal problems that are not the issue of people who are wanting to get art from me. I will try to do better, and this is a necessary first step.

I know that this decision will have people downgrade or end their pledges, and I've been kinda putting it off too because I don't really have the money at this time to be screwing with my primary source of income (Patreon.) But, something has to give, and it's giving. I want to get everyone's art done and have the commissions done, because I haven't had an empty commission queue in years and I want to see it. I want to know what it's like to not owe anyone any art, at least once. I almost had it once, but then I introduced this whole art reward thing that was mainly just a "I saw another artist doing it and went 'hey that's a cool idea.'" But what's a cool idea for another artist isn't a cool idea for me, I've realized - especially when they are doing art all the time, and that's not something I want to do.

Anyways, this post turned out way, way longer than I expected it to, but I'm just glad to put it all out there and write it down. I appreciate everyone's continued support, and I just ask that people not be too cross with me. Thank you.