Saturday Update! (Patreon)

Good morning and good Saturday folks!

I stand before you very much in shambles today 😂

As I mentioned last Saturday, I spent the week entirely on store work and doing my taxes, so I haven't made any progress on game development. The good news is that I'm done with the rush and taxes so next week I can get back to work and start the placeholders!

I think you guys will enjoy this coming phase, because you'll see more sketches. People seemed to enjoy it with the last two games!

The store rush went fairly well. To anyone who held back and ordered a few days after I posted the new merch, thank you! The first day was still rough with 5 ikea bags full of packages to drive to the post office in a borrowed car, but it went better than some launches in the past.

I'll give you a sort of behind-the-scenes look at what I do with new merch!

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The first thing I need to do with a merch launch is take photos of the new stuff for the store:

My setup is pretty amateur, but with some help from photoshop I can get some nice pics!

That's the second thing I have to do, editing all the photos. I don't like to make any edits that would misrepresent the items obviously, but sometimes I need to correct the lighting, and most of the work I do is cleaning up the background so they look nice:

[ one of the very few instance where photoshop's weird 'content aware fill' is actually useful LMAO ]

After I have a bunch of edited photos and some videos, I can make the product listings. This can be pretty complicated. On top of the obvious stuff like uploading the pictures, giving the product a title, description, and price, there's finer details that carry more pressure to get right.

I need to measure and weigh each item- and I absolutely can't get this wrong, because it affects what people are charged for shipping [ so Etsy can estimate the size and weight of your package when you order several items ].

I also need to look up each item's tariff code if it's something I haven't sold before, like the standees or the plushies. Tariff codes are a worldwide system that assigns a number code to every 'type' of thing you can ship. What sort of thing it is, and what it's made of mostly. Every country has different rules and tariffs, so these codes can be really important. For instance, one country may have a booming clothing industry where they make a lot of clothing, but they don't have any metalworking. That country might create tariffs for clothing [ charging people in their country an extra tax to import clothing ] to encourage people in that country to buy local, but leave metal items out of it, because they can't get that stuff locally [ I know we've heard a lot of tariffs in the news lately, but I think a lot of people don't know what they're normally used for ]

Anyway, looking up the codes is kind of a bitch because the database is huge and it can be hard to decide what sort of thing my products are. I noticed that there's codes for plush dolls and they're separated by age range, but there's no code for over 18 LMAO so I had to choose the catch-all 'other' category.

Once all of that is filled in and squared away, I can push the listing live and actually start selling the items. Then it's just the challenge of physically packing up every order, weighing and measuring it, filling out a customs declaration if it's not within Canada, buying a shipping label, sticking it on and signing it, and then taking it to a post box or post office.

This is where all the orders get packed up! My office. It's extra messy because I had full boxes of the new stuff for the rush.

On that first day I needed to borrow a car, but after that I just carried stuff on my back.

Thursday was brutal because it was like -20C and I need to walk to the post office, about half an hour, with bags on my front and back. Then I had to go straight to my tax appointment 😩 My muscles are still a bit sore 3 days later LMAO

But the rush and my taxes are done now! I'm still getting a higher amount of orders than normal but it's a lot more manageable. Just one bag needed now 😂

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On Friday I was Very Sore™ so after I did my package run I sketched a little bit and then took the rest of the day off.

I tried a sketch of Ashe in a sort of challenging angle [ I'll need one like this in the game eventually ]

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Anyways, I think that's all I got this week! Looking forward to just sketching placeholders next week 😂

Stay strong folks, and see you next week!