Chibiakumas transparency report!!! Future plans!

Announcements from ChibiAkuams - Forum info, New games etc!
Post Reply
User avatar
akuyou
Posts: 563
Joined: Mon Apr 22, 2019 3:19 am
Contact:

Chibiakumas transparency report!!! Future plans!

Post by akuyou » Mon May 22, 2023 9:28 pm

Here are my current plans for Chibiakumas over the 2024, This was originally posted to my patreon backers, but I want everyone to understand my long term plans and reasoning.

1.Platforms
The focus of my tutorials will be the 6502,68000 and Z80, I don't have any plans for more tutorials for the 6809, 8086 or other cpus covered in Vol1,2 of my books at this time.

The reason for this is time, it's tough to write good code switching CPU types every other week, and the other cpus don't have enough computers I can cover to make it effective.

For example: Maxtile covers 10 platforms on the Z80, so the time investment produces a lot of tutorials, but the 8086 only has really 2, so I can't really justify the time taken for the engine port.


2. Book 3
The second book hasn't sold very well (Around 20% of the first books sales over the same time period). Even though I cannot expect better sales, the third book is going to go ahaead anyway as half the content has already been written, The rest of the writing work on Volume 3 will occur over the Xmas vacation, and the book will come out around April 2024

Book 3 is planned to cover: MIPS SH2 TMS9900 IBM370 PowerPC


3. Future plans
At the start of the year I wrote an 8 bit virtual machine that runs on the Z80,6502 and 68000, it's my plan to integrate this with the previous code from Maxtile, Chibitracks and Quadtree video (and some other bits) to make a (mostly) multiplatform multicpu game engine, which can (in theory) be used for future game projects.
The 'goal' of this is to sort of create a multiplatform, multiCPU 'OS' where simple programs can run on multiple systems without rewriting their code (Though pattern and sprite data will usually need re-exporting)
I say 'in theory writing future games' because writing the tutorials is still taking all my time, so writing proper games as well is not possible at this time.

Releasing Maxtile tutorial videos will will keep going at the current pace, and I'll be working on this new game engine at the same time... basically I expect the current 2 tutorials a week to continue until at least 2025

I'm currently making 2 tutorias a week for patreons, but only releasing one a week to the public, and the videos being made public now are often made a year ago, the reason for this is twofold:

A. My new videos do not bring many views, most are from the old videos, so I don't get much exposure (new subs/backers) releasing more new content than one video a week.

B. I'm building a 'backlog' of videos so I can keep the new releases up in the event patreon no longer continues (They have said themselves a couple of years ago patreon is not economically viable, considering their liabilities to their own financial backers) or my backer count significantly drops. As I make $15 a month from youtube, In the hypothetical case I were making no money from patreon I would pretty much stop producing new videos and go back to hobbyist z80 only gamedev.


4. New Technology!
I'm not covering any more new CPU types going forward, and I don't really plan to cover any more platforms that I've not covered before.

The reason is simple, Sales of my book are down, Patreon backing is stagnent, and youtube views are decreasing, If I work out income divided by time, then I earn less than minimum wage for the work it takes to keep this up.
All this is fine, because ChibiAkumas is just a hobby for me, but it means I'm having to plan future work on the basis it will only ever be a hobby.

If Chibiakumas was able to produce a livable minimum wage, there would be the potential for me to spend less time on my day job, and more on Chibiakumas, but looking at the 70% drop in book sales over the last year, that is not ever likely to be the case. Unfortunately, as my 'backup youtube income' isn't a viable back up at all, I'm having to take on harder projects at work (at my day job) to maintain job security.

In the past, new CPUs and Platforms have been researched and tutorials written during my annual leave (usually over xmas), but I don't want to spend my holiday time on this any more.

I've been spending all my time learning and practicing coding languages I cannot use to earn me a living, and can not put to any use during my day job or writing tools for my personal day to day use.

In addition, As I've migrated to linux, I no longer use windows for my main PC (I'm doing my retro dev on a Win7 VM), and am not willing to keep play the 'windows upgrade game' of endlessly testing and fixing my old devkits on the latest windows (I hear windows 12 is coming?!? so much for windows 10 being the last!).

I can't really test and develop for new emulators, as I no longer use (or want to use) the latest Windows OS of my viewer base, nor can I do the same work on linux, as I currently don't have the skills to do so, and only 1% of the computer userbase are linux users, so it would not make sense for a mainstream audience.

As previously mentioned, my 'future plans' is to start a beginners programming series on more modern languages using the raspberry pi as a base. I'll still be doing relatively 'low level' style programming, relying as much as possible on my own code, and not libraries and the like for functions I can write myself.

As mentioned, the series will be branded as 'ChibiAndroids', and I'll make one tutorial every week or two *IN ADDITION* to the two chibiakumas ones.

I do not expect these Chibiandroids tutorials to be particularly popular, they are as much for my education, as I need to stop spending all my time on retro programing, and start spending more time on modern languages I can make personal use of, and to help me earn a living in my day job in the future.

Anyway, there we go! Lots planned over the next couple of years, hopefully you'll all stick around for it!
Keith
Chibi Akuma(s) Comedy-Horror 8-bit Bullet Hell shooter! // 「チビ悪魔」可笑しいゴシックSTG ! // Work in Progress: ChibiAliens

Interested in CPU's :Z80,6502,68000,6809,ARM,8086,RISC-V
Learning: 65816,ARM,8086,6809

Post Reply

Return to “Chibi-News!”