Miscellanea RPG Maps
patreon
Update! Also, an eight-question survey
🕑 Added 2020-10-10 17:01:03 +0000 UTCI'm back with a bit of an update - although I did manage to solve a few of my problems and get some of my work under control, I caught the world's most unpleasant case of the common cold and what seems like a fever during the week. Don't worry, it's not the local pandemic - tests came back negative. In addition to the fever, though, I'm now dealing with some difficult personal issues that unfortunately I don't feel are appropriate to share publicly, so I didn't get the practice I wanted with Clip Studio Paint.
Next week, I'm going to hope my illness clears up, and focus on practicing with CSP. I'll try to put together some practice maps, and post them here once they're finished. I can't promise that they'll be polished or up to my usual standards, because it's such an unfamiliar tool and the point is to experiment, so they'll be free if I don't think they are.
In the meantime, I've been thinking more about the business model I have. I've identified some issues - and I'm not sure how many of them are issues, so I've also made a poll - that I'll list below.
- Audience is split between various genres. I've brought this up before - some people like the variety, some people are only here for specific genres. Either way, I'm still not confident about how I'm handling it.
- Drawing 5+ variants per map is actually more limiting than just drawing more maps, surprisingly. If I adopted a somewhat sketchier style, and only made three or so variants per map without editing the actual line-art, I could probably produce twice as many maps as I currently do. This is because tweaking the line-art creates a cascade of extra changes I have to make (coloring, ambient occlusion, shadows, lighting overlays) and also because a lot of good ideas don't have room for substantial twists on the theme (I struggled, for example, with the cyberpunk nightclub I drew back in May; I ended up drawing a wholly unrelated highway map instead of more variants, and the Pokemon Stadium map came with a totally unrelated sword-in-the-stone thing, which was again, faster and easier to draw than another variant would've been).
- Maps might be too random in theme. I've been thinking about the idea of doing monthly themes for maps, possibly supplanting the map polls. August draw arctic/snowy maps, September draw oriental-inspired maps, October is mandatory spooky maps.
Crazy idea I've had is to split my Patreon, create a new one for fantasy works, and dedicate this one to the sci-fi stuff, and implement some changes there as A/B testing. This would definitely have to wait until my college classes end. Second idea was to switch this Patreon to a monthly system, with two maps a week, one for each category, and different tiers granting access. Monthly subscription change would be necessary since not every post would be relevant to each tier - it'd be a bit messy. I'm still considering it, it's too confusing to put into a poll.
So! I need feedback, on some of these issues as well as some other ideas I had. I've constructed a survey with eight questions, some related to the above points; if you could run through them, it'd be appreciated. The link is below.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/PJ3K2PC
In the meantime, I have to run to the store for medicine. Since I first created this post as a "Poll" and Patreon won't let me change the type without erasing everything I just wrote, there's a silly extra question below, which you're free to ignore if you've never heard of Splatoon.
