Major Announcement and Devlog (Patreon)

Hey everyone, so first of all devlog stuff. You can meet Haily on Sunday having a chat with Carla. I had some more scenes that were kinda 80% done but just didn't quite make it into the build so apologies for that.

Now, announcement time:

I have decided to produce Cabin by the Lake full time.

This for me, is happy news, but not in way I wanted this to happen. Some of you may know that I have been an entrepreneur in the tech space for the past 10 years or so. We have been producing quality goods and pulling people out of fires with boutique solutions for all of that. When it came time to pay back all those favours we were doing though, projects fell through, people who liked us were rotated out. A lot of very promising leads that will resolve in 6-18 months. If you're a business owner you know what this is like. We decided that we had the money to wrap all of that up now, and while we could easily go out even into next year... we were just tired of living contract to contract with half a dozen friends livelyhoods resting on that.

This happened faster than I thought it would, but as I said, not unexpected. 

I am choosing to take this time to follow my passion and go full time as a developer here. It makes me immensely happy that this is a viable path that I can take and that I will be able to really concentrate on this without interruptions. It isn't something that could have happened without all of you. Much love.

Now for the elephant in the room... I've talked before about the time when real life will cause a developer to choose between their food and their passion. I'm laying this out here because, really, the prospects are pretty good! I'm going to rework my goals for increased transparency but at it's current state, back of the napkin calculations show that if for some reason all growth just stopped dead, I would be able to push full time development out to nearly a year without having to worry at all. And growth hasn't stopped.

At the same time I want to lay out what full time means. Thus far I have been putting effectively 95% of my spare time into what I'm producing here, as well as a significant proportion of my time elsewhere planning and thinking about this. Reclaiming the 40+ hours a week from my previous full time gig isn't going to magically double my output. Similarly to promote continued growth I will be needing to put effort behind some more marketing and just getting new faces in front of this page here, which is something I've been pretty lax about for the past 4 months. It is also definitely time to spruce up the start of the game, it's pretty dull and just a few new renders and sprites could solve a lot of that (I'm not doing full remake or anything, just making it less static). I do also look forward to putting out more content and I'm really going to love the lack of interruptions.

If you wanted to help me, I'm not here begging for money, I feel that you are already contributing all you can, even if that's just nice words. I'm very much of the camp that if you see what I make, I either earn your patronage or I don't, and that's up to you. Changing that requires either me earning it harder, or getting more people to make that decision. So if you happened to be at a place that you could drop the name of the game, that would be fantastic.

Similarly I will also be able to reclaim some of my spare time. It wouldn't be healthy or productive to mash my head against Cabin by the Lake for 90 hours a week. You need time off to just do some other things, get fresh ideas and try out stuff. This means that I'll probably also put a bit more time towards some other things... like Fun Times at Fuckmore, which I know a lot of you liked. It's still a side thing in my spare time, but the last one was an accrual of about 6 months worth of work, hopefully with double the spare time, I CAN do double the speed on that. But we'll see how it goes. I may also trip and make a Starcraft 2 Mod... I like mods... 

Anyway... that's my novel for today.

As always, Love Nunu