Patreon Page Changes (Patreon)

Hey all, I'd like to tell you about some changes that I'm making to my Patreon!

Firstly, I no longer wish to have my content behind paid tiers. SEUS PTGI and my other work will now be freely available for anyone to download!

I think that for now I'll keep the current tier system, but know that they pretty much will only serve to offer roles for my Discord server. Perhaps I'll give special miscellaneous rewards for certain tiers in the future, but in general I don't want my Patreon to be a place where you "buy" my work.

I'm making these changes for a few reasons. Firstly, I think it aligns more with the philosophy that brought me to Patreon in the first place. Thus far, I've encouraged people to cancel before they get charged if they do not wish to pay (in the "thank you" email that new pledgers get), but really this is just a needless step. If you like the work that I do and want to support me, awesome! If you'd rather just download the thing and not have to get through a paywall, you should be able to do that more easily. Honestly, I wish I had made this change sooner. I've been afraid of change in general, but it's definitely time now. I want people to be happy here and not feel pressured to do anything they don't want to do.

Also, I think that the current system just isn't great for my mental health. Though I am absolutely blown away by your incredible support, I often feel a lot of pressure that is counterproductive to my creative process. My personal mental health struggles combine with this leaving me feeling overwhelmed and, at times, that I'm letting everyone down. Needless to say, these are not feelings that encourage creativity within me, especially being such an emotionally driven person.

The development of PTGI has become harder and harder, and at this point, I actually do feel that it's pretty much reached the highest place that I can lift it as it is. As I mentioned in my last news post, if I'm going to make something that surpasses it, it'll need to be pretty much entirely rewritten. This process is not only immense, but there are a lot of changes going on with Minecraft shader modding in general. I don't know where people are going to go or even what features are going to be available to shader developers in the coming months.

Also, my creativity is so much more than just PTGI! I've become afraid to share any of my other creative work. I am not the kind of person that can only work on one creative project. I've worked on a lot of other things that I've ultimately chosen not to share, here are some off the top of my head: 

• A lightweight version of SEUS
• A version of SEUS for Vivecraft
• Morrowind shaders
• ReShade shaders
• Dark Souls Remastered shaders and shader modding tool
• Elite Dangerous shaders
• Avorion shaders and textures

And those are just the shadery things. I also do general Minecraft modding and datapack creation, work with Unity, dabble with texture creation, and I'm a musician as well. It's such a shame for my other creative work to just sit there being enjoyed by no one. So, I want to start sharing those things here as well. Once again, not behind any paid tiers.

Ultimately, I want to relieve the pressure from myself and from you all. I want my Patreon to be a place where I share stuff that I think is cool, and if you think it's cool too, you can choose to support my creative work--not to gain special access to something, but because you genuinely want to!