Weekly Updates: December Week 1 (Important! Please read and comment!)
🕑 Added 2014-12-04 02:20:25 +0000 UTC
Helloooo!
I just put up a beefy 40 minute inventory tutorial, but aside from that there's some important stuff I want to talk about this week in regards to my milestone goals.
At the start of this month I lost a couple of you guys, which is by itself sad but also makes me feel I need to make something of a change regarding this $500 milestone, depending on what you guys think. With the value constantly hopping back and forth between just under and just over $500 and there being a huge, lifestyle changing, world of difference between "Content whenever I can" and "Content twice a week at minimum" this milestone is causing problems for me, and for everyone else.
Making videos to the quality I want takes time and effort. Back when I started doing videos they were often on topics I was already super familiar with (Platformers et al) and had a big pile of code to draw from. While I have the general experience and skill necessary to make the videos I make today, stuff like the Inventory system tutorial I just released requires a more in-depth approach than my videos used to require.
I have to consider how I would go about solving the problem myself if I were making that feature or thing for a game. (I had never previously needed to write an inventory system for example.) That means I usually need to spend some time writing code that I'm happy is not only functional, but is clear, understandable and versatile enough to be viable as a tool to teach others. I love doing this because I end up learning a lot myself in the process too.
After I have that, I can record the video itself. This itself doesn't generally take long once all the preparation is done. The editing and rendering however, does take a lot of time post video creation. There's a lot I can do in general to improve my videos through editing alone, but often skip over due to the desire to get more videos out quickly.
The reason I'm explaining all of this is that I no longer feel like the $500 milestone of 'Two videos a week _minimum_' is 1) Conducive to high quality videos. 2) A reasonable 'first' milestone to suddenly jump to from nothing.
In addition to this I think a lot of Patrons are attracted by how close I am to a milestone and may be persuaded to support even if they're not necessarily prepared to commit to monthly payments. I'd rather avoid this and only attract people who conciously want to support rather than well-meaning people who are drawn in just by the desire to see me beat my milestone.
I also think that many people see this milestone as a commitment to making two TUTORIAL videos a week and that the description is therefore mildly deceptive which I don't like
Thereby, what I would like to do is split this into two milestones. At $250 I would guarantee one TUTORIAL video per week minimum and at $750 I would guarantee two (again, tutorial videos specifically). This makes the increase in content more gradual, and takes the value we're at now (a kind of steady number around $500) and puts a commitment to continued tutorial content rather than going between "nothing at all" and "two videos a week".
What do you guys think about this idea?
