on any random day for the past three years, i've thought about everything on my bucket list to do. write a book (which i did! phys/digi), create a narrative game (of which i made several!), and then make a VISUAL narrative game. that last one is still in front of me, but the problem is - who will play it?
even worse, who will pay for it?
when making prior narrative games, i either did them entirely myself - with the incredible help of my spouse's coding ability - or by paying an artist a relatively modest fee (150 usd for two pieces of artwork on one game), and then doing the rest myself. with the extraordinary way that Twitter, savage land it is, allows posts to spread throughout circles of friends of a friend of a friend, i got a lot of attention on my projects and grew a following from them very quickly! not only that, but a good amount of them paid, despite the games being free!
with the possible?/likely?/inevitable? demise of that website, i don't know how i can reach a further audience, or even the audience that i do have now. of the 6,000+ people who follow me on Twitter, only 60 or so have followed me to a Telegram channel for my posts, and 31 are subbed to my Patreon. while i am extremely, EXTREMELY glad for their support, without which i couldn't even think about doing larger projects (or even live as comfortably as i do!), that... isn't the literal hundreds of copies of SLIME TIME sold. literally thousands of dollars from people who only know me passively, as followers, as fans.
without that broad base of support, and reach to people who don't even know i exist until my cool project post shows up on their feeds, what's the point in investing into larger projects again?
i well and truly don't know. this is an extremely difficult situation to be in - my best bet, right now, is to use Tumblr to rebuild the gamedev and serious writing portion of my audience, should Twitter go down. if it doesn't, thank the fucking powers that be because it means there'll still be an audience.
i'm not foolish enough to believe that there's no point in making art for art's sake. there is, and so many incredible creators are going to keep making things that will impact further creators for years and decades to come. there's a future for all independent art, but.
i just don't know where i'll be in it.
