What's coming next for the ol' Klok Patreon?

March. I haven't made a post on here since March, FFS. Time flies so fast, and my sense of it feels like it's getting less and less connected to reality. Sometimes I swear a day has passed and it's actually been five. Maybe that's just the result of growing older, I don't know.

Well guys, long time no chat. I finished work on the... let's call it, 'initial release' of Andaron Saga. I'm not satisfied with it, and I plan to remake the game in a new engine with a new team while this time possessing my own creative control. The game as-is is perfectly fine, but the problem is that I have higher quality standards than 'perfectly fine' and I generally think the game is incomplete and a bit of a hot, rushed mess. I needed more time to write it properly, and even rewrite it.

So, over the next few years, I'll be taking it a lot slower as a side project and giving it the time to cook that it deserves.

And that's all there is to say about that. Aside from that project, here are some more updates:

My work on Umi AI has ground to a complete stop since February or March. I was too busy working my butt off to finish Andaron Saga by the arbitrary deadline to put a single minute of focus into Umi AI. That resulted in me falling further behind on AI stuff, as I knew it would. It's been a snowball effect on my motivation.

Now that I have my own time and deadlines I can adhere to, I also can look into how I'm allocating my time. I need to rethink my life priorities, essentially.

I'll be 100% honest here: Patreon doesn't pay my bills anymore. Yeah, it's down to $230 a month, and my rent is the lowest in pretty much my entire city, at $450. I've done the math and I'll be homeless in approximately three months. So, I'm getting a part-time job to pay them bills. At least I sure HOPE I am, because I'm applying to lots of places and one of my friends should be lining me up with something.

Once I have that job, a job I've previously worked and that I enjoyed, I won't be treating it as my backup and my Patreon as my 'main squeeze.' Instead, I think I'll be making my writing and other projects drop to second place. I won't be overworking myself at my job, but I won't be trying to stress about arbitrary deadlines for posting TCTH parts either. I'm going to pull way back on my mental workload and just kinda... relax.

As for Umi AI, my HDD died yesterday, the one that had my Github stuff, my AI stuff, and all my WIP projects. It was my secondary backup drive, not my primary backup drive, but the loss of that data was still painful. I lost about 400 Loras for AI and some other fun stuff, including the files for the WIP update for Umi AI I was working on. I'll need to rebuild that update from the ground up. It sucks, but it's not as bad as you think. It's just gonna take me time...

So, TL:DR, a lot has happened. I haven't accomplished much financially over the past 6 years, and have slid backward if anything.

I want to keep working on Umi AI, and TCTH, and on Andaron Saga's remake, and I need to work a job too, but that's... four projects. I'm not sure which of those is the most essential. I think I'd tier them like so:
- Day job
- TCTH writing
- TCTH publishing?
- TCTH new website? Wiki??
- AS Remake
- Fire Emblem portrait/sprite generators
- Umi AI

With Umi in particular, it feels to me like the advancements in AI are coming SO fast that we'll soon have the ability to just say 'generate a completely random character' with a text prompt and we'll get exactly that. I've already done this a hundred times by using a ChatGPT prompt and then pasting its output into Stable Diffusion. Once the LLMs become multi-model and integrate directly into image generation, tools like Umi AI will become... functionally useless? I guess?

I don't know how long that will take, so we'll see. But I imagine it'll happen sooner rather than later.

I don't know where this ultimately is going to leave me, so I don't want to make any hard predictions. What I do know is that my MAIN goal with AI is not to develop AI for AI's sake, but to develop solutions to problems I've encountered in my writing or to make myself a more efficient writer. Umi AI will probably change shape over time, but I want to return to my roots of using Umi AI to develop characters and help write my stories. I think that's most important.

Sorry for the kinda long rambling post. I just felt I needed to say SOMETHING, since I haven't said a thing since May.

More TCTH writing soon, as always!