While I generally prefer not diving too much into this sort of thing, I felt the need to put down my thoughts right now. Long story short, an important supporter on my Patreon decided to suddenly pull out yesterday... after which I'm left with both major life problems as well as a few personal questions.

Obviously I'm not going to name the person in cause. I should also make it very clear that I do not hold this again them, and perfectly understand whether they either couldn't or didn't want to further support my projects. However it doesn't change the fact that I lost 150$ overnight (roughly 25% of my total support), which in my situation is a pretty big deal. This not only leaves me 60$ under the target for which I released Vore Tournament 2.0.0, but also back in serious financial trouble which I hoped I was beginning to avoid. Ironically I'm far less upset at this than I could be right now... namely since after dealing with darker news from across the world that's had me stressed on a daily basis, I barely have the energy to be concerned over my survival from a financial perspective. Never the less this is a disappointment, and it's making me ask myself things.

On one side, I get the worrying thought that some might have only supported me to see me reach the $400 target and release VT 2.0.0, after which they were like "finally, I got this guy to post his game" and left. Of course it would be unfair to conclude this is the case for anyone in particular... especially since I've seen the opposite in action, as a lot of folks started supporting me after the release was announced and up for download! However I should clarify that this wasn't how I intended or imagined that target, as I'm uncertain whether anyone might have thought otherwise; I envisioned this goal as a permanent milestone, rather than a stick I put up then asked people to see if they could jump high enough to touch it once.

In the more general aspect, I'm beginning to wonder whether I'm doing things as right as I could be; I just can't seem to defeat the curse of not staying over 400$, and I'm starting to wonder whether that's due to my own actions in part. I've seen other artists who make the same genre of content I'm creating, admittedly at better yet not embarrassingly far quality compared to mine... many of them are past the $1000 milestone, so it definitely is possible! I've done my best to produce the best content I can, which I've been doing since before Patreon and would keep on doing regardless... of course that's referring to the best that can be done by a single person working on multiple projects (games and animations alike) struggling to finally finish either of them after years of slow production.

For now I'm putting together a few ideas to hopefully motivate people some more... one I'm working on right now and will hopefully announce during the next days. In the meantime, I'm thinking it might be time to ask other people what it is they would like to see me do better, and which of my choices have disappointed them in the past if any; I might do so more formally in another journal or announcement later on, but for now please share your thoughts here if you wish to and have an opinion. As for Vore Tournament 2.0.1, it will definitely happen in the coming months so don't worry, although this event might make it harder to bring myself into tackling the more complex plans straight away.