2022 Retrospective and 2023 Roadmap

Whew! What a year. Some highlights include:

- Growing Swords from 20k to 91k followers on Webtoon!

- Growing STARS from 0 to 10k followers on Webtoon!

- Had three successful Makeship campaigns! Quest Sprout, Travel Goblin and Pest Sprout!

- Had my most popular comic post on Reddit ever! Swordle!

- Left my day job and started working on Swords : Edge of Chaos full time!

- I've been in contact with reps from Makeship, Instagram, Webtoon, Tapas, Tumblr and Reddit... I can't talk about most of it, but there's some exciting stuff happening behind the scenes! It's taken up a lot of my attention.

I've had... honestly a lot of setbacks too. The digital landscape is rapidly changing and it really makes it difficult to know what the future holds.

- NFTs boomed for a while, which meant I was dealing with a lot of weirdos trying to make money off me and dealing with a couple of small legal fights when people helped themselves to my work

- AI art has entered the scene and while I'm not that worried about it, I can see how it can be used to make artists lives much harder

- Elon Musk purchased Twitter and suddenly there was a LOT more spam. So far the benefits seem...unclear. Many people are leaving.

- Since Quest Sprout's Makeship campaign in January, I've had people asking how to get one every single day. It takes up so much time and energy explaining that isn't how Makeship works, having people argue with me that I should just do a kickstarter to make them myself (ignoring that manufacture and shipping from New Zealand is far from feasible) and so on.

- Dealing with, frankly, some really toxic fans who have threatened to destroy their Quest Sprout plushies if I don't end the story arc the way they want...

- Dealing with a lot of customer service issues around Threadless, Makeship and my Ko-Fi store. I know some of you will say "that it comes with the territory" but it really does eat into time I could be making cool stuff.

- I had to learn a lot about how to do taxes. Eesh.

- I broke my front tooth! Thank you for supporting me because it was not cheap to deal with. New Zealand dental never is.

A few more personal things happened too, but let's not dwell too hard on those, haha.

Now that the chaos of Christmas is out of the way, here's a few things I want to focus on between now and March:

- Continuing work on the video game (I wanna show you more soon! When I'm allowed to!)

- Finishing Secret Project X. I definitely can't tell you about that.

- Doing a big update to Swords : Pens & Papercuts in January. I decided to take the whole project in a new direction. The next step will be to create a set of paper minis, a map and a bundle of sword cards you can print at home to do some serious playtesting with.

- Continuing the Gladiator tier Swor'nament for Gladiator patrons

- The next instalment of the Time Knife saga is fast approaching. Perhaps you'll learn more about Kargob?

- Wrapping up Quest Sprouts arc so he can return to one-off adventures. I'm considering changing my weekly pattern from [3 Patreon-voted comics in a story arc] to [3 Patreon-voted comics in a story arc + 1 guaranteed Quest Sprout OR Ghost Bros.] comic.

- Preparing for the 5th Anniversary of the series on March 5th - I'm hoping to hit episode 700 for that date (that's a comic every 3 days, average) where something special might occur in the Swords Universe...

- Preparing for the next Makeship campaign in March. If you put aside $2 a week from now on, you'll be ready! But I can't tell you what it is yet...

- A spring clean of the Discord server, which has a lot of room for improved engagement

- A refresh of my Patreon tiers. I'm no longer supporting Stabatars, unless someone directly requests one - I don't think there was a ton of engagement on them. There's a lot of places we can tighten things up too.

- I'd like to see if I can get the first instalment of physical books made or at least prepared to announce in time for the Anniversary, but I might need some help from an expert with that one

- Oh! And I promised I'll learn how to blacksmith a real sword this year if I hit 800 supporters in January! I know how much you guys wanna see me do that.

And that's about it! There are probably some things I forgot!

Thank you for supporting the series, loving the characters and for being excited for the future with me. Wow! It's a time knife!