I’ve sent an email to all my former patrons with a temporary solution that will grant them access to premium content and functionality. This access will last until some fix to monetization will be found.
So, my former Patrons - check your email.
Thank you for your patience.
Where it comes to the further CH Replay development, there are two possible scenarios:
1) Some alternative crowd sourcing method will be found and I will resume my work on this project in a same capacity as before and hopefully it will allow me to look for a part time job irl.
2) Any type of monetization will indeed prove to be impossible or unreliable and I will have to start treating this project as a hobby and not a part time job – which would mean drastic decrease in the amount of new content and frequency of updates.
Taking a break:
Finally, the realization of what’s happening with the project sinked in, and it all downed on me last week. Shout out to fragrantEmulsion, who convinced me to not to do something stupid with the project during my episode of emotional distress. :D
Now, I’m looking at it little bit more realistically. From the very beginning I knew that the likelihood of my Patreon being banned was high and expected sooner or later. I think that as the time went on I just didn’t wanted to see it and it really caught me off guard.
Also please don’t blame them – I was clearly in the wrong there.
I might be repeating myself and I feel a little bit strange writing about this, but I think it’s important for the context. I hope it will not come off as my public jerk off session. :D
I’ve been working on CH Replay for the past year and made a lot of time and emotional investment into it. There were periods that stretched over weeks, sometimes months of nothing else but just work and sleep.
And even thought at times I was full of doubts and frustrations, I loved every second of it and there was always this sliver of hope that maybe this could be at least my part time job in the foreseeable future.
The amount of rounds that I’ve created in just this one year would easily make for 4 full length CH videos.
I’ve also learned lot of new stuff about js, html, css and did fair amount of coding with help of fagustree.
I’ve done a lot of research and read everything I could find on game design, replayability, randomization, procedurally generated content, Patreon, marketing…
It was absolutely insane. And I think I went little bit insane too at some moments. :D
The issue is that this kind of workload while also having a regular job is simply unsustainable in a long term. There are a lot of things and couple of people in my real life that I’ve been neglecting and putting aside for the past year.
That’s why I’ll be taking a break from working on CH Replay for the rest of this year. There are lot of things that need to be cleaned up and taken care of before I continue.
I’ll be still active here on Milovana, on my discord and we will try to find some solution to the current monetization predicament together with fagustree.
I’m not giving up just yet. I just need to breath out before, hopefully, jumping right back in again. :)
I really hope you will enjoy
replaying the game in the meanwhile!
