September 7 Update (Patreon)

Alright, it's finally the week for my big post about long term career and investing time. Let's start with a foundational statement: when you're a self-employed creative, you don't clock in or clock out, and you don't have a manager to direct anything, which necessitates making continual decisions about your work.

Even if I'm focused on something, say spending 95% of my time/energy on finishing a TLS update, that work still consists of many different aspects that need to be paced and juggled to maximize efficiency. But this post is less about that and more about how I choose to focus my energy in the long term. This isn't a list of things I'm currently doing; it's things I have done or could potentially do as I consider my career.

A Tangent on the Long Term

Ten years ago, my life was hardly miserable by the standards of the whole world, but I wasn't thriving. I did not like my job and my creative efforts achieved no success, the only ones making bill-paying money were some romance novels I completely half-assed. Eventually, of course, things turned around, and I find myself in an enviable position thanks to everyone's support. ^-^

In the early years I was concerned that it would all fall through, and not without reason: crowds are fickle, technologies change, and platforms like Patreon can ban without warning. I've been working to diversify and build a stronger foundation for myself, and thankfully I can now take some pretty big hits without it wrecking my career.

The question, then, is where do I go from here? My ambitions are fairly simple in the abstract: I want to keep making things. But ideally I'd like to make bigger and better things, and thinking about how to do that is where the path gets less clear. As I've said before, continuing to create work at this level isn't a bad outcome, but I want to keep reaching higher due to the same impulses that made me want to do creative work instead of a safe normal job.

Tackling Bigger Things

There are inevitably limits to how much I can do myself, which means I need to work with others. The least complicated path is to make so much money that you can hire people with other skills, but more on that later. A more complex set of options could be grouped as "Convince people to invest in you". For many game devs or authors, that means finding a publisher. I'm also including people who invest time: I remain grateful for so many fans who have contributed to some of my projects. Hypothetically that could include partners in some sort of revshare situation as well, a much riskier time investment.

I'm not in a position where I can just bounce around doing whatever I feel like, and in any case, that really isn't my personality type. I want to spend my days working on things that both bring me satisfaction in the short term and get me closer to my goals in the long term. But which things those should be is a more challenging question because the ultimate outcomes are always ambiguous.

Obviously TLS is a massive part of my career and will remain a significant chunk of my work, but I will be dedicated to finishing it, not polishing it forever. The progressive conclusions will mean disruption and potentially loss of support. I could try to draw things out forever with never-ending expansions or constantly producing more of the same, but I haven't set up my career this way so far and I don't intend to start. Those who vocally only want TLS will get the best version of it I can create and can step away when they choose.

Meanwhile, I have more ideas than I can possibly create in one lifetime, so the question is choosing among them based on the criteria I mentioned above. The hope is to find projects that will make people happy while also putting me in a stronger position to keep making enviable choices like these.

Steps to the Future

So all of that said, here are some of the things I am working on, planning, or just considering, and how I consider them based on the above. This is more openness than creators generally give publicly, so hopefully it's interesting or at least insight into my thought process.

Long-running Sagas: For example, the spiritual successor to TLS, the science fiction project I'm calling The Final Void for now. As I've said before, I don't want to just leap into another project of this length, even if that's the easiest way to maintain patrons. I want to first get TLS properly finished, plus I'd like to figure out my resources before I make key decisions that could determine another decade of my career.

Other Games: Will absolutely happen (see the previous series for some of my WIPs). Games are kind of a tricky beast, however, because they require long development periods and then drop most of their profits within a month. So long as I have income from varying sources, this isn't a problem, it's just a question of how ambitious I can get with the budgets, and how much I can do as a solo developer.

Self-published Books: Reliable and with much longer sales tails than games, I'm very happy to have writing books as a part of my career. But I find there's a pendulum of energy where sometimes I want to write a lot and sometimes I'm eager for game development again. Obviously it's extraordinary that I can do both, but what mix of both is best, and which projects? Difficult decisions.

Traditional Publication: By contrast, writing novels for big five publishers is investing time in the hope of, at some point years in the future, getting more attention than I could get on my own. Traditional publishing is slow, and the process of acquiring an agent sucks. I know, I complain about almost every aspect of business and promotion, but I mean it: the agent process is the worst part of either of my careers. -_- The work I've put into this could be a breakthrough moment for my career, or it could end up being an almost total waste of time.

Game Collaborators: Not everything can be me-focused, especially when it comes to finding collaborators who are real partners in future work. One option that has come up, in varying ways, is to invest my time in the passions of others, hoping to eventually find a partner in work who I couldn't get by money alone. This is something that I've occasionally put time into but has not come to anything yet.

Go For Broke: One option would be to stop worrying about turning a profit and try to make the biggest game I can, including getting more collaborators, a game publisher, and so on. The goal here would be to make a splash and get the sort of attention that my more modestly-budgeted games never could. Obviously, the risk with this is that most such attempts fail and more games than ever launch and go under the surface with barely a ripple.

Go For Cash: Going in the opposite direction, I could try to build up enough money to fund bigger things on my own - slow but secure. Problem is, I think the most lucrative options would be things that I'm not really passionate about. The most successful adult games are ones that don't include anything I find sexy, but I am reasonably confident that I could produce such content. Likewise, many of the most successful books aren't interesting to me, but if I got a hit it could fund future work for years.

Kickstarter Uncertainty: Thanks to everyone, I dipped my toe into crowdfunding with DstP. I don't know how much of a role KS will play in my future career, or if it would be a good fit for any projects, but I'll be focused on finishing this so I have another completed thing in my portfolio. Showing responsibility seems to be less effective than promising to make a 3D VR MMO for 100k, but I work with what I've got.

Obviously the solution will require some combination of the above. I only got a reliable artist like Annikath through the popularity of TLS, but that wouldn't work out if I hadn't built up the funding to pay her. On the other hand, there are limits to what you can buy with money; some types of reputation can't be simply purchased. Ultimately I would need to find talented and passionate collaborators, which is a tall order even for people in much stronger positions.

The Non-Conclusion

So... I'm facing an optimization problem where basically every variable is unknown. Any given project could fail or succeed. That novella I wrote years ago barely paid for itself, but it opened publishing doors, but those haven't had any results, but they could one day, etc. Depthless Hunger failed to hit a lucrative market, but it's already made more money than OEA despite using fewer hours of my time. Etc etc, it's all unclear.

One of the few things I'm certain about is that I would like to focus, because as much as I enjoy changing gears from time to time, I'm happiest when I can concentrate on individual works. Unfortunately, with my career as a middling success making marginal games/books, just going all-in on one thing would be a recipe for career that ends in abrupt failure.

It may seem ungrateful to say this for an audience of people directly supporting me, but I don't feel as though I've found a creative home yet. My life is so much better than it was ten years ago, and I'm grateful for everything, but I'm not in a position where I can ignore all these considerations. Hopefully in ten more years I will again be in a position where I can make more decisions based on passion and inspiration.

It's extraordinary that so many people have responded to the passion I've put out so far, and thank you for your support taking me this far! If you have enjoyed my work up to this point, I hope you will enjoy what's to come. ^-^