This one’s a bit late, partly because I was running on limited sleep for the last few days, but mostly because I don’t have all that much to talk about…

For reasons that are 100% my fault, I don’t have any new pixel art to share this week and not much else that’s new jumps out as especially worth talking about. (Well, at least nothing about Dreamblazers itself; I’ll talk about what’s going on with my life right now at the bottom of the post.)

So first I wanted to share a blurb of dialogue! This was based on the tweet from a couple weeks ago and I wanted to expand upon it. This is just for fun and is an immaterial side conversation that you can fully skip over in the game, so don’t read anything into it related to the main story. :P Plus I realized while putting it together that there’s still a certain face for Jig that I’m missing and is needed to complete this conversation.

Now that we’ve had our fun, let’s talk some more financial hullabaloo if you’re up for it (and if not, bail out now).

Like I said a few weeks back, I recently took on part time work. When this opportunity was first offered, they anticipated wanting me around anywhere from 15-25 hours per week. And that held up for a while! Rather than calling it part time work, though, contract work is probably the more accurate term I should have used. You see, things have slowed down over the past ten days or so, to a point that last week they effectively didn’t need me at all. Work has picked back up this week, but my point is that it’s unpredictable how many hours they’ll need me at any given time.

So the bottom line is I’m back to money concerns. Exactly how concerning are they? Well, there’s a 0% chance that I’ll give up on funding continued monster pixel art, but there’s a, uh—let’s just say not at all a 0% chance that I might have to release a rougher initial demo than I had hoped.

Of course, Flora’s art and Becca’s art and Alex’s art and Liz’s art is all just perfect, so for the reader it might look like we’re doing fantastic. But remember what we don’t have: GUI elements like menu skins and item icons and so forth (thus why the above dialogue isn’t done in a long sequence of in-game screenshots), visual effects like magic and sword slashes, music, and sound effects.

“But isn’t that what Kickstarter is for?”
Well… kind of. It’s not what I was hoping for.

I wonder if it's primarily pride, reason, or ethics telling me that I will *not* go to Kickstarter before I have a playable demo.

— Jelly Paladin (@JellyPaladin) April 17, 2015

Obviously I love the idea of crowdfunding and I’ve supported 150 other projects, so if anyone could permissibly show up with a demo where everything that’s actually in the game looks amazing and everything that’s not in the game seems like the craziest omission ever, it’s probably me. People have showed up with a lot less, frankly, and I’ve been there for them.

I’ve honestly asked myself recently if I should sell my house. Unless the value has fallen in the past three and a half years, it would be a windfall of something like $30,000-ish after taxes, though obviously that huge short term gain would come with the enormous lost opportunity of—ya know—an entire house.

I—I don’t think that selling it is the correct answer. I think that going for crowdfunding with an admittedly rougher-than-expected demo is. But in all honesty, I don’t like that, so it’s been demoralizing. Still, I suppose I have to do what I have to do…