General Updates

Hey folks,

October was a light month for me content-wise and I'd like to be transparent about what's going on behind the scenes and my roadmap for the future.

As has unfortunately become the habit, I've been working feverishly up until the last minute to get some content published, leaving my finances to the whims of my performance in the mad dash to the finish line. Rather than working on a single project at a time and following through until its completion, spacing my releases out across the month like a more responsible and self-disciplined artist might, I've decided to tackle a handful of ambitious maps all at once throughout the month in the vain hope of finishing all of them on time. So now it's around midnight on the West Coast (when Patreon ticks over and starts processing pledges) and I've got a single map completed and several others that are 90% of the way done but not complete enough that I could stand by them. I didn't want to half-ass them, publish them and then spend the next few days cleaning up the Patreon posts and begging for patience from my awesome supporters. So I'm taking a big financial hit this month, and I'm doing so deliberately in an attempt to break this cycle and get ahead of my content. I have a lot of lingering issues with my back catalog that I've been meaning to tackle, but I haven't managed to stay on top of a release schedule well enough to tackle them. No longer!

Before I lay out the roadmap for my future releases, I'd like to be candid about some recent challenges that have affected the consistency of my products. The TTRPG space was booming when I started making maps, so much so that it offered me an opportunity to leave my job and pursue a career making art (what I actually went to college for but could never make work financially). It's been hard to accept that this space just isn't booming like it was in 2020, but that's the reality. Many of the larger creators in this scene have hit a plateau, and it's harder than ever for smaller creators to find visibility. Some of this has to do with economic factors, and some of it has to do with waning enthusiasm for the hobby in light of the OGL debacle earlier this year. But I'd wager it more has to do with generative AI content flooding into every commercial space, devaluing creative labor at an unprecedented pace. The discourse has been weighing very heavily on me, and in an existential way. I'd like to say I'm not shaken by what it can do, how quickly it's gotten there, and how inherently exploitative the development of these models are, but it's frankly made it harder to find purpose in what I'm doing most days, or sometimes even to crawl out of bed in the morning. I've got more to say about AI in a forthcoming post, but the long and short of it is this: I don't condone the use of current models in a creative workflow due to inherent issues with the sourcing of their data. I experimented with gen AI tools in much earlier stages of development, when Midjourney was in closed beta access and better suited to rendering surreal landscapes and abstract swirls, and at the time I saw great promise in utilizing this tech as a tool to generate concepts, layouts, and textures. But as more information began to enter into the discourse and adjacent creative industries started striking in partial response to concerns of AI misuse, it became pretty clear that this was not a tool designed to empower creatives, but rather to cut them from the process in the interest of generating more revenue for the model developers, who then conveniently shift any of the copyright responsibilities onto their end users. It's a confusing and scary time to be a freelancer in a creative field, and frankly I'm worn down.

Because of these concerns, I've had my hands in a few other projects over the last few months. As much as I'd like to commit myself fully to making TTRPG maps, I don't know if this will be viable in 5 years, or maybe even 1. I'm going to keep going until it's not, and then probably push it past the point of viability due to stubbornness for another six months afterwards, but I can no longer afford to put all my eggs in one basket. Before anyone says "adapt or die" or perhaps some kinder variation of this sentiment, I've played enough with these tools to know just how little skill and labor is involved in generating images with prompts, at least relative to my current workflow, and I'll be damned if I reduce a lifelong passion for drawing to doing touch-ups of prompted imagery. I find great joy and catharsis in my current process, even the tedium. Hell, especially the tedium. So in response to growing concern that I may need to pivot more imminently than I had hoped, I've had to split my focus. I'm concurrently holding down this map business, working on a Mork Borg book, creating physical paintings for a future gallery exhibition, and developing a portfolio in the hopes of landing a tattoo apprenticeship. I've had a taste of working for myself as an artist, and I'm not giving that up easily, but dividing my focus has been challenging and I'm coming to terms with the fact that I haven't built enough structure to manage the increased workload.  If you've made it this far, thanks for bearing with me and for your continued support, because things have been hard lately and honestly, I can really use the support.

So what am I going to do about all of this?

As I said earlier in this post, I've got a couple other maps that are *nearly* complete. So I intend to finish them up and publish them early in November. One map is a fantasy/steampunk train series that I'm pretty excited about, and the other is a multi-level city map that contains over a dozen portals and with little environmental vignettes of various multiversal locales. The other maps in November will include a new astral ship I've just started work on as a commission as well as the 11th level in the Megadungeon series.

I used to write little flavor text descriptions for each of my maps, but as I had gotten into the habit of pushing stuff out at the last minute, a lot of these descriptions have fallen by the wayside and now I've got a good bunch of them I'd like catch up on. There are a few little errors here and there throughout various releases that Patrons have pointed out to me (goof ups during exports, grids where they shouldn't be, missing promo images, that sort of thing) that have sat too long on the to-do list, so they're getting done in November too. Probably the most daunting project of all is tackling my Foundry back catalog, but luckily an awesome creator in this space has generously offered their help and will be assisting this technically-limited aging millennial. For months I have wanted to get my content up on Moulinette, but I've held off because I've needed to first do the above clean-ups of my previous releases, as well as update everything to v11 (since there's a new .json structure that makes the old releases incompatible). Once the Foundry catalog is updated, not only will I jump on Moulinette (I've been approved and have back-end access already) but I'll also have my Foundry content hosted externally on my own site, providing manifest URLs and an overall easier way to access my content. Starting off November ahead of my release schedule should give me the flexibility to make this happen.

Three years into this journey, I'll admit I'm not where I hoped I would be, but my art career is also far more successful than I had envisioned when I was settling into a retail track, nearly a decade after abandoning any hopes of utilizing my illustration background. Thanks so much for being a part of this. It really means the world to me.

-Zach