TYNK UPDATE #5.5 - MAY 6th, 2024
Hey everyone, Happy May!
Thanks for your patience during the quiet. Things have been very hard.
As I talked about last update, losing my prospective publisher after half a year of crunching has really put me in a tailspin that I'm still trying to steady. My old social media instincts seem borderline useless in the current website landscape - I never would have expected the environment to change so rapidly in just a couple of years.
Maintaining consistent public interest in something as glacial as gamedev is an art in and of itself. I believe I've spoken before about how managing social media during the initial campaign was easily multiples of magnitude harder than any actual gamedev - it's one thing to get attention and it's another to be able to reach the kind of people who would actually resonate with Tynk! on platforms that seem to be swerving directly into reactionary subcultures. + Anyone who's tried to build a following from something "ongoing" can tell you that it is a uniquely isolating experience to invest so much effort in selling yourself/your thing when the growth most of the time is so slow. I'm grateful for each and every one of the people who support me and push me forward but when you know that you have to pass a distant threshold in order to survive (and you're constantly overextending yourself to try and reach it) everything short of a miracle tastes like failure.
In a funny way this kind of experience is almost half of what the story of Tynk! is meditating on. The "hashtags" joke had only started to feel archaic before I realized that the shape of Tynk's grind-for-relevancy is set in stone for the foreseeable future. Unless silicon valley decides to catch fire the parts of Tynk! that are biting and analogous will remain relevant, and at least that's promising for the reception of the game-!
The cat that moves at a snail's pace:
I've had to put everything with Tynk! on hold while I scramble to make ends meet. My freelance work on Beastieball has been wonderful and fulfilling but there is only so much left for me to do on that project, after that I'll need to find other supplementary work. I've been slowly building up a ko-fi where I offer membership rewards like unreleased tracks, concept art, and sometimes commissions open exclusively to my monthly followers. It operates basically like a Patreon. I may upload Tynk! materials now and then, but I won't be uploading a lot of stuff from the game - I don't want to cheapen the backer rewards (like concept art) before they come out, and I also don't want to make any of you feel obligated to support me monthly after you've already helped so much!
It has been disheartening to not be able to work on the game these days, but my hope is that I can build enough of an audience that my ko-fi income will eventually be enough for me to resume development. In the meantime (hopefully just the next few months) I'll be working on and releasing much smaller projects to extend my fearsome reach. My first venture is an interactive ten-page long webcomic called TEN PAGES (also available on tumblr), it's been really fun responding to people's ideas and it's almost done - Come be a part of the ending!