Hello! It’s crazy that the year is almost over, I’m working on the Halloween animation that I promised folks on SubscribeStar. But you may be wondering what happened to imposter syndrome, the short answer is that I’m still planning on it but it’s been pushed out a bit as I work on the Halloween animation and some other short animations as well.

One of my biggest challenges is my own ambition. The same thing happened with Teleporter Bugs, but it should be no surprise that I’m an amateur and so when I get an idea and want to create a high quality animation, sometimes my skills aren’t quite adequate enough to reach the quality that I’m hoping to achieve. That’s where I feel I am currently with Imposter Syndrome. I really want Imposter Syndrome to feel like a quality short movie so there is a TON for me to work on with my own skills before I’m going to feel ready to go full speed working on it. That doesn’t mean I’m not doing anything, but I’ve been working on these side animations with the goal of improving certain skills with each one. The Halloween animation is meant to be a shorter animation but it focuses on many of the skills that I want to improve before tackling Imposter Syndrome.

Character Development

One of the weak areas in Teleporter Bugs was the character development. If you think about it we don’t really know much about Lulu, we don’t even know that much about her personality. So one of the goals I set for myself this year and for working on Imposter Syndrome was that I wanted to make the characters feel alive and focus on the character development so you get to know them. Now I’m definitely not a best-selling author or anything, but taking some inspiration from anime and throwing in some common tropes and stereotypes mixed with backstories and some side animations that help give you a sense of their personalities is achievable. So that’s been the focus when I introduced the characters Blake and Aubrey, they have some backstories and personalities to them. There’s definitely more side animations to come that will help tell those stories but their personalities are well documented and I have a fairly detailed plan for their stories.

As for the others I also plan to include some side stories with Sally and Lulu to portray their characters some more. Sally is pretty straightforward in my opinion, as the mad scientist it’s pretty easy to follow her personality. Lulu will be the interesting one, she has a much more complex character than anyone probably realizes and that’s entirely my fault for not developing her character as much. So look forward to further focus on developing both new and old characters.

Roadmap

So what does this mean for the roadmap? Well it will be subject to change, especially since I’ll let the SubscribeStar folks vote on some of my priorities and which side stories they want to see first. But the general plan is to finish out this year with the Halloween animation and then after that get back to animating side stories that lead into the full Imposter Syndrome animation. That means things like animations depicting the backstory for Aubrey and Blake or side stories that help us see Lulu’s personality, etc… and then along that path I’ll pick off animating portions of Imposter Syndrome and once enough of the backstory and side stories have been told it’ll be time to get back to Imposter Syndrome and I’ll start releasing it in parts on SubscribeStar and then for the final release I’ll combine everything together, add a few extra scenes and bonus content and then release it all together. It’s hard to say when all that will happen.

One factor is the support on SubscribeStar, which has been humbling to see how many of you have been willing to support me and I’m super grateful for it. But of course the more support I can get then the more I can afford to hire other people to help out with the projects and one day if I earn enough I could make it my full time job, which make my progress skyrocket multiplying the time I could spend on it by about 5. That would mean my 1 year projects now only take 2 months, but even a little bit of support now at least means I can hire people to create the different scenes which saves me a week or two of effort.

As things are now it will probably take me most of next year to work on the side animations so I doubt I’d have Imposter Syndrome done by then, but it’s entirely dependent on how things grow and things have been growing pretty well so maybe it’s alright to be overly optimistic, I’d really like to finish Imposter Syndrome before the end of next year. I’ll try to focus a bit on promoting my content next year and see if I can’t speed things up.

Thanks so much everyone for all your support whether you’re a financial supporter, give me feedback and suggestions, click a like button or simply just check in every once in a while, I appreciate all the encouragement you give me.