Fundraising and Character Commissions!

Hey friends!

I am currently in fundraising mode: the character artist and I are moving to onboard a second character artist to help speed along production, but it's increasing our art budget by a solid $900/month just to commission them part time. Between our now 4 artists, our art costs are about $5000/month. That's right, I'm spending between $1000 - 1500 per month out of pocket to fund game production.

I've been brainstorming for a little bit how we can close this gap to make steady game development sustainable on my student budget. We are eternally grateful for everyone supporting us already - for those on the fence about joining as a paid member, I know very well that money can be tight. However, even $1/month can mean a lot for game development! To put it in perspective, if a significant portion of our free members were to bump up to the minimum $1 tier, we would be able to fully fund the rest of Ch. 2's art production in a matter of months! But in the meantime, I think I have at least one idea.

In the last year, multiple people have reached out to request commissioning a character from our artists. I've actually ended up taking up a few of the requests because I thought they were interesting and the offers were good enough - see attached, which I have permission to share. The whole thing has prompted me to wonder if this might be a good opportunity for us to tackle multiple developer and community goals at once.

As such, I am tentatively opening up my message inbox to commission offers for custom characters. Some stipulations: 1) I will apply a strict and judicious filter to the commissions I accept; 2) the commission fee has to cover the full art cost of the character, the opportunity cost of the artist's time and mine, and then some more to help cover direct TNH costs; and 3) the commissioner has to agree to the character's Live2D game-ready model being made accessible as a TNH modding resource.

The reason for 3 is that we intend to use this as an opportunity to encourage our modding community by addressing the most significant hurdle to adding new characters - the art. The plan is for us to provide the modding community with TNH-ready assets, such that the only modding requirement is the writing of interactions with the characters themselves.

To summarize: we are opening up commission requests for custom non-Marvel characters. These commissions will serve the dual purpose of 1) funding the expansion of our TNH art team and 2) expanding the resources available to our modding community. By enabling the expansion of our art team, we intend for this to be an overall accelerant to TNH art production. We will not under any circumstances allow this to slow down TNH development - I am in no rush to rapidly accept commissions and will close commissions entirely at the slightest hint of a problem.

We are under absolutely no obligation to accept commissions and will turn down requests at our discretion. Note that a starting range for commissioning a single pose animated in Live2D with two outfits is $750 - 1000 based on complexity and can quickly escalate based on what is desired! I recognize that this is a steep fee and encourage y'all to crowdsource your funding if you have a custom character idea that is popular.

A final point: our wonderful writer Buttholder will be additionally offering his writing services for anyone who wishes to commission writing for a character. Please reach out to him directly on Discord if you are interested.