Patreon Monthly Update: August 2015

Greetings, Patrons! Last month I made some promises about things I intended to do in July. Of course, what I failed to realize at the time, was that it was like... July 11th that I wrote that? So when I say "last month," what I really mean is "a little over two weeks ago."

There really wasn't a ton of time to get much done in July once I got home. Especially when you consider that my graduation is on August 8th, so I spent the majority of July crunching really hard on math. Seriously, we're talking like, 9 hours a day, all so I can take the test this Thursday and be ready to graduate on Saturday. So much math that my brain was starting to melt out of my skull.

On the plus side: I am writing this from a new laptop! Well, "new." I am currently house sitting for my cousin, and as payment, he gave me this Dell Latitude E6410 laptop. It's slightly used, but on the plus side: Windows 7! And maybe even Windows 10, soon!

I won't be able to really use this laptop for gaming much, but when I get home on Tuesday I'm going to see how it handles all of my capture gear. Hopefully it'll handle Open Broadcaster, which means that capturing video might get significantly easier. I have it on good authority that even though Roxio's capture software is a giant pile of flaming garbage, using the Gamecap HD Pro with OBS works extremely well and will record to regular ol' MP4 instead of that garbage version of M2TS they use.

If it all works out, my video production pipeline will have a few less bottlenecks in it. It might also mean recording PC games would be easier, as I could feed HDMI from my desktop in to the capture gear hooked up to the laptop. No more worrying about how screen capture effects performance!

So what else is going on?

• I've never felt comfortable offering up my fangame projects behind the Patreon paywall. I've said that if non-Patrons wanted them, they could request my fangame projects and I'd post them for free on Mega.co.nz or something, but that didn't really make it feel any less sleazy. So, for all the fangame projects I've posted on Patreon to date, they are now available for free! Hopefully you patrons out there are okay with that. It's just not right charging money for them. All of my original games and software, however, will remain behind the $5 paywall (Draconian, Space King, future projects) -- but any fangames from here onwards will be free for all.
• While we're on the subject of games, I've been thinking that I need a place to post previews of my game projects without them getting washed out by Tumblr asks, so I'll probably get something on that front going in the next couple months.
  
•  Do you remember that book pitch I mentioned? After a month of thinking it over, talking with friends, and sending emails around to the likes of guys like Jeremy Parish asking for advice, I think I'm going to make a go at writing the book anyway and self-publishing it somehow. I've never written a book before, so there's no guarantees that it'll get finished, but let's see what happens, eh? As a working title, I'm thinking of "How to Kiss a Hedgehog."
  
• Everything I mentioned last month is still happening! Hopefully! Once I get my diploma, my caseworker wants to talk about "the future." She mentioned possible scholarships, grants, and other nonsense. I might be going to college! ...Twelve years late! (Well, Better Late Than Never, right?) College sounds scary and like it might take up EVEN MORE TIME than school does currently. But we'll find out! It sounds like I'll have other options on the table when we meet, so I'll keep you up to date.
• In spite of the new Laptop, the new PC fund is still happening! This laptop probably won't become my primary computer device, so I still need to replace the big chunky desktop soon. We'd probably almost be at enough money where I could think about buying components, but I ended up having to spend some of that money here and there on other things. I should go on the warpath soon and remind the world that I have a Patreon, so stay tuned for that.
  
• If you didn't read it, I published a Sonic Runners review not too long ago. Some would say you don't need to publish professional reviews of free-to-play mobile games, given that you aren't really losing anything for playing them. I think those people are crazy! Which is why the review is like 2700 words.
  

That's all I can think of currently, though admittedly I am not in the best position to go through files and things to talk about what I might be forgetting!

Have a good August, all! Let's hope I can find the time to get some cool stuff done this month.