Just a general announcement about the future of this Patreon.

Hi, guys...

Just to cut to the chase and save you a lot of reading, the announcement is that I've suspended the billing on this Patreon. I will likely relaunch in March or April.

Why?

To put it simply, there's too much to do and not enough time to give it all the attention that it needs. This December was particularly chaotic. My online shop, papercraftdungeon.com, broke and it took several days of work to  get it back up and running. Apart from that, the general chaos of the Christmas season, and constant struggles with power outages, have really thrown a spanner in the works. Of course, the problems started long before December... It's been a constant struggle to stay on top of things, and when the obligations start piling up, and every delay makes it harder to squash the ever-growing to-do list then everything starts to slip.

So, what's the plan?

I'm going to use this time to try and clear off as many of the nagging obligations as I can. Once I'm over that hill and am no longer playing catch-up, I'll be turning my full attention to relaunching this project. There are two main areas I need to fix and I plan to use this time to address those issues.

The first priority is in streamlining the process so that I can actually deliver content more consistently. This is mostly about fixing up flaws in the workflow and identifying and clearing out all the bottlenecks where things get stuck. There are many points where improvements can be made here, especially in the stage where the art assets are turned into the PDFs. Dozens of hours of work can be done in mere minutes with automation and clever upfront planning, and I've already implemented many time-saving scripts. I'll be writing some more of those, and rewriting some to make them work more efficiently. One major problem that I run into frequently is that some "clever" innovation (or careless mistake) renders my existing automation useless. When that happens, I land up doing everything by hand again and that turns 15 minutes of work back into 15 hours of it... Taking the time to redesign my workflow and restructuring the process so that everything works smoothly and efficiently every time will go a long way to making things a lot better.

Of course, even with the best laid plans, things are bound to go wrong, so before I relaunch, I plan to get some "emergency reserve" content created so that I still have something to offer when chaos makes it impossible to stay on schedule.

The next priority is in marketing and communication. Part of the problem is that this side of things is both time-consuming and a distraction from other work. When time-pressure gets too high, this vital aspect of the business is one of the first to derail. This is something I really need to get a handle on, so I'll be putting some time into designing a reliable marketing strategy that will be easy to keep up even when things are chaotic.

My hope is that with those issues addressed, we'll come back much stronger when things relaunch. I'd like to build a lively and active community around this hobby of ours and I'm very excited about the possibilities!

In the mean time...

The Patreon will still be up, and you can still chat and interact on the discord server. Immediately before this post released, I published the Tier 2 version of the Dragon, and the Tier 3 version is coming as soon as I've  got all the buttons on the PDF working without any bugs! I'm very excited for you guys to get your hands on that one because it's absolutely packed with options!

Thank you all very much for your support, and once we're over this small hump, I'm looking forward to doing many cool things for you all in 2021!

Thanks,
Kevin