September 27 Update (Patreon)

This week I put out another TLS art preview and more DStP demo builds. Thanks to friendly people playtesting, I don't have to spend time running through the game again, but it does leave me worried the build won't be viable somehow. I've also tried to jump through the last of Valve's hoops to get the game into Steam Next Fest. Fingers crossed that page/build will be approved.

Another bit of news: Throne of Time has hit the top ten of all time on RoyalRoad, and held long enough to get the achievement! Competitions is fierce, though, so more reviews are always helpful. If you've been considering trying this, it's my big shot at a time loop series.

An Artist Situation

Anyway, this week I'm going to talk about what I think is the first time I encountered an art scammer. Not every working relationship with artists is equally smooth, and long-term patrons may remember trouble with DStP artists going MIA for long periods, but I've never interacted with someone I thought was insincere until recently.

As I've mentioned, two of the pixel artists I selected for Four Liars have been lovely. The person I chose for the environmental tiles, however, was a consistent issue with delays, excuses, and ultimately not delivering workable art. I did see some pixels that I couldn't use in a game, both for quality reasons and because the tiles weren't formatted properly (despite all our communications on that).

I like to give grace to people, but this person also asked for 100% of the payment up front, allegedly so they could dedicate themselves fully to the project. Most artists will ask for 50/50, or do a small art test first. I could go into a number of other details that seemed suspicious to me, but the conclusion was that I started to be concerned this person was not a sincere artist, but a scammer trying to run out the clock on payment disputes.

The thing is, I'm not completely sure. Their communication was extensive and mostly good, which doesn't seem like something a scammer would do... except that we now live in a world with LLMs.

I'm still unsure about this part. The text wasn't very polished, but it could have been run through a humanizer (machine or a person just adding errors). One thing that threw me a little, but could have been someone's personal communication style, was the way that they repeated so many of the points I made. Very thorough human being, or an algorithm just parroting back what I wrote?

Eventually I decided that I had to cut my losses and, for the first time ever, filed a PayPal dispute. PayPal ruled in my favor, so at least I didn't lose money out of this... but I did lose a fair amount of time, and the whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Either this was a very strange situation or I chose poorly with this one.

Anyway, while this was going on, I contacted one of the other people who applied, and they have seemed good so far (they did the sample scene from last week). I hope to be able to show fun things over the coming weeks, and ultimately in Four Liars. Thank you for your support.