BIG OL' UPDATE: Scheduling + Rewards + Stuff

Heyo, helpful humans!

Y'all haven't heard from me in a hot second, but I have a good reason. This year is about making the show sustainable, building a team, and getting it to you in a quick and orderly fashion. It's a rough thing to figure out, but I'm slowly beginning to get a grip.

Here's what I've learned so far:

1. Expectations follow experience

By which I mean you can't reasonably begin to develop expectations for something until you have some experience with it. I'm an artist, not a meteorologist. I'm not supposed to predict how a thing will turn out before I ever do it; I'm supposed to do a thing for a long time until it's second nature, and then when people ask "how long?" ballpark what usually happens during the process. It feels like I've been doing this backward since the show started, and only now am I really starting to get it. It's liberating to admit.

2. You can't force intrigue

Or maybe you can if you're particularly clever, but I wasn't given that gene in embryo. I've got a weirdly obsessive mind, and it's hard to wrench it away from the task at hand. And truth is, the task at hand isn't always visually interesting or conversation-worthy. 

As you can imagine, this has made scheduled Patreoncasts and Forge Sessions a bit of a nightmare. Sometimes they fall right into the windows where I'm doing really neat, conversation-worthy stuff. Often they don't, and I end up spending ridiculous amounts of time just sitting around, trying to figure out how to wring some intrigue out of editing a timeline in Premiere or splicing audio in Audacity. There's only so much of the process that's actually going to be interesting to share. Admittedly, this had been a significant source of stress for me lately, and I feel it's been hurting my productivity on the show.

3. The art comes first

When you make something people like and they begin to congregate around it, it can be easy to forget you were ever an artist and start thinking you're more of a PR person. Managing rewards and communities, reaching out, maintaining your image, etc., etc. I've seen a lot of creators falter at a taste of success, and I feel I've been leaning in that direction, particularly here on Patreon.

I think it's time for me to focus more on the show, and to revel in its successes with you guys when we have them. I think that's the most important thing, here. That doesn't mean I won't still share with you, and it doesn't mean I won't be around; it just means I'm pacing myself, making sure I'm sharing at the right moments so that the show is buoyed up and energized rather than bogged down and exhausted.

Understanding all of this, I've decided to change things up here on Patreon a little. Nothing incredibly significant, but I want to make sure you're all explicitly aware of what's going on:

Change #1 — Progress Bars

(TL;DR — Scheduled posts weren't working, so now I'm making posts and having livechats/forge sessions as we achieve goals on the progress chart)

If you have a look at the home page, you'll see this thing instead of the usual Schedule graphic:

I've been sitting on this for a long time, waiting for a good moment to implement it. Reflecting on everything I've learned above, I finally decided I should get it out of the way.

But that's not all.

The more I thought about this thing, the more I began to realize that I'm not celebrating the actual progress of the show with all of you. I've enslaved myself to a generic schedule that may or may not sync up with my actual pipeline, sharing arbitrary snippets of content just to share them because the schedule demands.

The result is that, although you guys may enjoy the posts, they've been a discordant mess for me, constantly struggling to find entertaining angles on boring parts of the process, or wrenching my mind away from the work at hand in order to have a passably-interesting conversation about something else entirely.

Solution? Save it. Talk about what's happening with the show when it's worth talking about, and keep you guys updated in a passive, visual way in the interim.

In the end, this'll mean fewer text/patreon posts and more livechats and forge sessions.

Overall, I think it'll be a more fun, genuine way to share what's happening behind the scenes with you guys.

Change #2 — Rewards

(TL;DR — Hand-written letters are becoming a $100 reward and replacing easter eggs, which will no longer be offered; only engineers or higher can participate in Forge Sessions, but there will be Livechats and Q&As more frequently, which will be public, but only TF Patrons can participate in; everyone who has already unlocked a reward at a given tier will still receive it)

This one is just a result of evaluating rewards, how long they take to deliver, how many I'm delivering on the regular, and how it affects production.

What I've found is that letters are super time consuming to produce, but extremely well-loved when they're received. It wasn't really sustainable at the $25 tier, as much as I would have loved to keep it there. They're actually more well-loved and coveted than taleoid adoptions have been, if the explicit feedback of fans is to be believed. So, I've gone ahead and moved it up to the $100 tier. THOSE WHO HAVE UNLOCKED LETTERS AT THE $25 TIER ALREADY WILL STILL BE RECEIVING THEM.

I've also changed something else about he $100 tier: easter eggs will no longer be available as a reward. I was reflecting on incorporating them into videos, and realized that I'd be sacrificing video quality to make it happen. These videos take so much to make in terms of time and resources (from you guys and me both), I don't think it's the right choice to offer something that would actively decrease the quality of the product we're all waiting on, even if the easter egg is worked in so as to be almost seamless.  THOSE WHO HAVE UNLOCKED EASTER EGGS WILL STILL BE RECEIVING THEM. 

Finally, there are a couple of smaller changes lower down: Only $10+ patrons will be able to participate in Forge Sessions and Livechats and Q&As will be public, but only Patrons will get to participate (chat). This comes from the schedule changes. There'll be more livechats more often, so I want to involve the larger community in those. The bigger change here though concerns the Forge Sessions, which will only be accessible to engineers ($10+ patrons) going forward. This is because they'll be happening more infrequently, and I want them to be focused, engaging discussions with fewer people chatting overall.

Finally: I will no longer be recording and uploading Patreoncasts. The more frequent Livechats will kind of take their place. They've turned out to be too much of a strain on my production schedule, and I always feel exhausted by the prospect of trying to wrench something interesting out of the boring parts of the process when there's nothing much to share. Overall, I think the livechats will also just be more fun for everyone.

Phew.

Okay. So that's a lot, but functionally it doesn't make a huge difference. I'll still be posting weekly progress updates to let you all know what's going on, and I'll be updating the Progress chart frequently. Daily, if possible.

Thank you all for being so patient with the lack of posts as I figured this out. This Patreon changes a lot, but that's just a result of my this long, perpetual learning process I've engaged in by creating Tale Foundry.

Ultimately, I think this is going to make the TF Patreon a lot more fun, even if there are few posts in the feed. I'm looking forward to sharing the successes of the show more often with all of you in live chats, and seriously discussing my findings in Forge Sessions.

Let me know what you think of these changes! I'm always interested in your feedback.

—Benji <3