Skunkfrakker & Veelicious
subscribestar
Monday Update! Hi Everyone!It's Monday, and it's been a…
🕑 Added 2020-04-20 10:19:00 +0000 UTCMonday Update!
Hi Everyone!
It's Monday, and it's been a weird week. Fortunately, the Patreon saga eating up my time is coming to an end, and I'm sorry that affects here a little bit.
Let me talk about that just a moment, because I don't have the ability to talk about it over there: you know all that work I put in for them over the last few weeks? Specifically, redesigning the launcher, redesigning the key system, setting up special tiers for Patreon, answering emails saying that Besti X would be able to remain on their service, etc...? You know: the things I've been doing specifically per their orders?
Well, they've decided that it's not only emails from two years ago that don't count. Emails from even a week ago no longer count. That stuff they told me to do that took weeks of work? All for nothing. I'm told that I need to delete all posts made after 2018 so that it looks like they never existed, and that I need to produce something entirely new for them, immediately, lest they delete my access account and presumably seize the funds they're holding. The incredible cherry on top: I'm told that the brand name "Besti" now violates Patreon's rules on sexual violence.
Needless to say our relationship with Patreon has effectively ended. I suspect they just don't want pony/furry content in any capacity, but we'll find out. The goalposts from them are constantly moving, and I simply don't have the resources to play their games. If you've ever worked in retail: this is the situation where they reduce your hours in an effort to get you to quit so they don't have to pay you unemployment for firing you. We're not violating any policies over there even vaguely, and they know this. To accomplish whatever their real goals are, they're just giving us the runaround at this point.
In any case they are, at present, blocking many of my internal tools and preventing me from posting content over there. I need to expunge the site completely so I can get the final Besti-related payout from there, so I need to do that right away instead of working on the video today. If you watch the videos I'll try to get the video ready by Friday, because hoo boy there's a lot of stuff I want to talk about.
This week is obviously going to be me buried in emails as I process hundreds Patreon refunds (each costing me more money than I'm refunding), I need to eliminate the safe key, remove Patreon from everything written on the web, and I suppose I need some new business cards, too.
What a phenomenal waste of time this has been. I'm so sorry. All I can say is that after this week, we'll be done dealing with Patreon and able to focus entirely on production again. I just want to make some damn content!
Anyway:
I managed to get in a very solid Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday this week, resulting in a bunch of stuff getting done. A distant family member of mine passed away on Tuesday from presumably COVID-19, so that ate up the early part of the week as I was pretty disturbed by this. I don't know if I'm just inordinately disturbed by people dying or what, but it's been on my mind all week. I spoke with her just a few months ago at my step-sister's daughter's birthday party (she was my step-sisters' mother) and I've known her for over 20 years. She never really liked me, but still, the teeth of the pandemic frightens me a great deal.
In any case, 4 15-hour days at a mixed focus level wasn't enough work to get the updated Besti SDK up, but you can check the changelog at the end of this post.
I also worked out a new way to get additional support options for folks that can't join over here. I get ~10 emails/day from folks who can't join us here because of SubscribeStar's limited payment options, so I'm going to make an alternative through a company called GumRoad to let those folks switch over. The content will be identical on both, so if you want to use an e-currency instead of a credit card, I'll have that option available shortly. Gumroad is not a community management platform like SubscribeStar is, though, so no Discord/Comments/Interactivity over there. This will still be the best place to be a subscriber, but alternatives will be available soon.
Also by popular demand, I'm going to make the Extreme Content key its own entity rather than being its own tier. I've had literally hundreds of people request to have a tier where they're a normal subscriber with access to realistic creature content instead of a producer, so that's going to happen. I can't do that at present on SubscribeStar, but I can on GumRoad and it can essentially be an "Add on" type of feature for folks. I'm going to contact SubscribeStar to see if I can set that up in some way but it will be an option, shortly, and it's one of the things I'm going to be working on this week to launch next month.
One thing that Gumroad does offer that I like quite a bit is the ability to sell one-off items. This will allow me to sell physical loot much easier, as it has an etsy-like point of sale system where I can simply put up items for sale if you're interested. I make pretty nifty sculptures, and since I can't sell those through Patreon any more I'll have a cool option available for that. Again, that's one of my tasks for this week and I'll keep you posted on that.
I'm about 3 days behind on emails, so if you've written recently and are awaiting my reply, I'll be with you shortly. I'm glad things are starting to settle down so this one last disturbance as we close Patreon and we'll be back to work for you like we always have been <3
Here's the changelog for this week, and I'll repeat, my goal is to have the video out on Friday covering last week's activity <3 I was going to finish that up today, but I need to do this final runaround for Patreon immediately and I figure I'll get everything up so I can talk about it in the video, so Friday.
- Worked with a 3rd party developer on improving Oculus Quest performance on the part in Besti X he worked on. The Quest is a fucking turkey when it comes to particle rendering because those live on the GPU, and the GPU on the Quest is silicon infused with goblin cum.
- Fixed a menu rotation orientation problem that was going to cause issues down the road.
- Wrote a new Signed Distance Field shader for text that lets me arbitrarily specify where it renders in the render queue. This is needed to provide the effect used by the menu that allows it to exist in its own 3D universe.
- Changed the background menu color and opacity. This should probably be a setting. I'll revisit this when I work on the settings again.
- Designed and drew several new icons for use in the in-game menu. These continue to have the purpose of rapid visual identification by users of various functions, and also serve as an accessibility feature.
- Made appropriate buttons out of those.
- Created appropriate reaction animations for the primary navigation buttons on the left menu.
- Actually let's do the update to the menu overall design to make it easier to interact with. Made those models.
- Created highlighters to the primary navigation buttons on the left side so it's more obvious which menu you're on.
- Wrote a menu button management program so button processing can happen in a low-overhead way for persistent buttons.
- Wrote a plugin for that program to handle highlighters so the correct button is highlighted based on what menu is displayed.
- Updated the display animation to handle the new models. Also found a problem that was being a minor waste of RAM so I fixed that. Every little bit helps.
- Set up event listeners so external sources have the ability to alter the menus without having them directly wired together in some way, and it means things can self-wire themselves into the menu system (essentially let other things like the tutorial or selected items bring up appropriate menus.)
- Reconfigured animation to never disable the aspect of the menu that handles which menus are visible. This is not a terribly elegant solution but it means less coding and permits the menus to change when they're not visible.
- Established the menu flowchart system and underlying infrastructure to handle in-game menus. The previous betas had this hard-coded, but this one is going to go through the new flowchart menu driver used for the main menus.
- Tested the functionality of the new flowchart menus. Works great.
