Uncategorized – Hornbostel Productions Blog & Shop

Early October notes

The Unity issues described previously have been sorted through.

I’ve been able to get development going again on Crowdsourced Adventure, Astounding Worlds, and a handful of other indie game dev projects.

The sites are going to see major updates by Oct. 10 reflective of current status, and that is going to be interesting to a lot of you.

Crowdsourced Adventure is being launched by November. Astounding Worlds by end of 2024. Other titles, over 2025.

Also lots of itch.IO updates arriving over the next three months so a big finish to 2024.

In the case of Crowdsourced Adventure, there are no fewer than seven worlds with design docs relating to them, that’s the first location and some options following it. Some of these docs have ‘contingencies’ and those are possible ranges of design variation depending on both success of the project and public feedback steering many aspects.

The game won’t see any near term launch on Steam or Epic. The first run is fully freeware and web embedded, though if you pay for Astounding Worlds on itch.io that gets you a build of the two games that can run offline.

The Steam/Epic version is identical to that earlier itch copy aside from slightly reduced compression, the textures will be slightly better than on any other venues. Should the itch version of that listing manage upwards of $50 in sales, that’s the threshold when I put down $200 for Steam, Epic version listing.

That’s that listing specifically. The one with offline versions of these two titles for about $2. The itch profile as a whole had made a few hundred dollars in sales, selling stock media content that in its own right has involved hundreds of hours of work to date. That is, a TON of photorealistic texture art, that is thousands of seamless photo based PBR texture files for 3d use, hundreds of really efficient 3d assets, etc.

If you’ve noted a climb in activity on itch profile in 2024, you’re in no way wrong. This year I’ve seen a 40% increase in follower count there and about 40% of the revenue the profile has ever had. It’s an extremely encouraging development.

Better yet, it comes in tandem with what still very well could be a record breaking Etsy run. And all that is nice, Etsy saw some crazy spikes in activity by late 2023 and it consumed my life for about 3 months trying and often failing to keep up.

For 2024, some breaks, aka ‘vacation mode’ are baked into the plan and that was clearly true in August. But that’s because of a determination to diversify. I do not want to be dependent heavily on any one shop that could shift its rules arbitrarily at some point and cause disaster. Itch.IO, other upcoming venues, and especially my own shops will be key to ensuring resilience in the event of a future Etsy issue

That is big for many reasons. I’m throwing literally $300 into ads and promotional plans this fall. That backs itch and the game sites and so on, and about 1/3 of it will go to the audience here paying attention. Even before the big Crowdsourced Adventure update, there’s already a ‘help’ page that clarifies how you can obtain randomized prizes for sharing the site link in other areas online like social media or forum profiles. The prizes range from free asset packs to Etsy coupon codes / discounts, papercraft-kit PDFs for download, and yes, in about 10% of cases, small gift cards for shops like Amazon, Steam, eBay and Walmart.

There is a value in that grassroots sort of promotion. The first 200 shares will all result in prizes, and there is ZERO reason you cannot share a link in a dozen different places, claiming 12 random prizes.

The gift cards are worth about $100 but the other stuff may be valuable to you too. So give that a shot via this page maybe?

The other $200 in ads are run pretty well, and I am sure those will lead a total 7000+ REAL people to matthornb.itch.IO, CrowdsourcedAdventure.com, or AstoundingWorlds.com. Odds are, I think, fairly good that this campaign will be profitable as it’s really well optimized and a recent $10 trial run preceding it pulled in 380 visitors and raised $26 in sales on itch.IO. That made clear to me that some sort of barrier had been breached… Now there are just enough reviews and comments, enough customer feedback on my itch space that people feel safe and justified in buying things on that profile. In the past, I pushed tons of people to look but nobody would buy anything, and small ad campaigns attempted on occasion always failed to break even. Now, suddenly, it’s hitting a point where 1-2% of those who show up there make a purchase, which makes the promotion suddenly worthwhile.

And that pushes things to go WAY faster there moving forward.

For half a decade there was a ton of work going into itch but no justification, no feedback saying, hey, this is worth doing, this can exceed a dollar per hour worked… and now it has flipped from demoralizing to exciting, encouraging, and a genuine priority.

And that highlights the sheer impact the presence of user feedback has.

Every rating, review, comment, all the positive responses are impactful.

Heck, I have donated some $40+ this month across highly efficient and effective charities and the spike in Etsy and itch.IO sales gave me the resources to do so. I won’t ever abuse itch’s system or bribe anyone, the feedback’s always been t genuine, but if we can keep that building up it will impact sales and the decisions of future possible customers, and at least 20% of what I gain from these sales overall is usually donated so…

In theory if the shop doubles its total revenue each year for the next 5 years it would lead to a massive volume of releases launching way faster than before, and a mass of donations sufficient to save over a dozen peoples’ lives. (Some of the most effective identified causes can save a human life routinely, for as little as $200 donated, meaning a thousand $ donated there keeps five people from dying from entirely treatable or preventable painful illness.)

I think that would be an amazing thing to do and if I ever succeed at anything that is a lot of my intent, indeed a major motivator to make something work out in my business. I want to help other people. I like the work too of course, I love providing useful services, entertaining people, helping with their projects and creating my own but I also really want to make an impact on people’s lives financially, so my two major goals as a business operator trying to turn a profit, are to do that, and to entertain and assist making life more enjoyable and worthwhile with the work itself. Creative freedom is a big goal. I want enough cash coming in to keep making better and better things, that delight people and improve the world in tangible ways as well.

That’s kind of my objective. It’s my objective maybe because I have been through a ton of social abuse and various health and trauma crises. I know life hurts terribly. I want to make it better for people. If I can improve my own life too that’s nice but it’s a distant second aim. I am going to be creating a site, MatthewLylesHornbostel.com, addressing my personal story and what its implications are, at some point soon too. That site too should arrive around when the new game site designs go live.

And finally: I have some awesome visuals and puzzles and story ideas ahead and not all of it will appear in the pitches that are voted on, but know every proposed concept is ‘partial’ – a story premise provided but the ending isn’t spoiled, some of the scenery shown to provide a look at the world but not views of every area, some general puzzle mechanics indicated but the solutions to be discovered while playing.

There is a whole dev pipeline behind Crowdsourced Adventure. The three options posited as voting choices for ‘what comes next’ in the imminent website update, will all be reflective of fully thought out worlds with maps put together in Photoshop, grayboxed entirely with puzzles being tested, the storylines all written down and some parts not just loosely grayboxed but fully detailed in 3d. The three worlds proposed, in short, when the new site design goes live, all are at least 40% made now. Any one you choose can move forward fast – within two months or so it can be done – and when it releases a new choice opens up and it too will be at least a third done by then.

This is to say, a solo dev making six 3d first person game levels a year somehow and making them look beautiful and run smoothly, and that basically is like making a full Myst-like game by myself every year, essentially.

The actual Myst devs, as a side note, tried to do this every 5 months roughly at one point, a new world of moderately big scope each month released as part of their failed MMO ‘Uru’ but they spent millions of dollars a year going in there and had fifty people working on it full time. I’m launching this by contrast, by myself part time, on a budget well under $1000 a year, and that would be unthinkable aside from the presence of an established game engine and many custom shaders built in, visual scripting, etc, a major suite of tools making the task difficult still but attainable and a more efficient process than what they faced then in not just making a game but with multiplayer networking, and a custom in house game engine adding to the technical difficulty.

I have issues with Unity 3d. The basic people working on the engine are great, the leadership at the top post-IPO is not. The infamous runtime fee proposed idea is one that got enormous blowback from developers poking holes in the concept. It was quickly replaced with a more traditional 2.5% fee on revenue over a certain level, which was a much more sane way to monetize Unity games.

I am still using the engine, for now, despite some broken trust. I’ve already gotten through the learning curve and have the essential tools and workflow figured out to make games there. The choice to pivot away would be a major delay on top of a lot of work already done on many projects.

For players’ concerns, remember that just because a game uses Unity doesn’t always mean it’s junk. 70% of all mobile games use Unity, and over 30% of PC and console titles. This engine still [for now anyway] is an absolute industry giant. Think about the fact that many beloved titles used Unity and nobody seemingly knew they were Unity because they spent $180 on Unity Pro each month to customize the opening screen with their own logo, not Unity’s.

Unity’s potential in terms of mobile optimization remains phenomenal. Look at titles like ‘Pokemon Go’ and ‘Among Us’, ‘The Room’ and ‘Monument Valley’ and those games’ sequels. Alto’s Adventure. Temple Run 2. And many, MANY others.

On the bigger end of things, until recently Unity coordination on projects with over a few dozen developers got messy and problematic, which is why Unity is almost never used on AAA titles (yet) but many of those issues are being fixed recently. Still, if your dev team is under 30 people, a ton of teams have done great work using the system in the upper indie or low-end AA space. Escape from Tarkov. Genshin Impact. Ori and the Blind Forest. Outer Wilds. Eastshade [done almost entirely by one guy who made a visually lovely open world in Unity]. Subnautica. Firewatch. Viewfinder. Etc…

The range of things possible is big. There is not an identifiable ‘Unity look’ as some claim is true for many UE4 titles. But that flexibility and efficiency is helpful. It’s an engine that can make nearly anything. It’s a great engine being ruined by former EA and Zynga execs who now are trying to please shareholders by making it more profitable, and that has potential to ruin it slowly over time but at its core it still has a userbase BECAUSE it continues to be usable in making a wide range of games.

That flexibility matters here. I’m making a bunch of worlds that amazingly will look good and also run smoothly in a web browser, which is never easy. WebGL games must be in filesize below 500mb. And that is a hard limit – 500mb to download, maximum, and then 500 set aside for it to run in browser memory. Or 1GB total use. Which for a typical browser tab is as high as you can ever possibly go. So if it looks like a realtime title from the 2000s sort of, this is why. It’ll look better though than most browser games you know. You may be surprised.

And the compromises required to make that happen generally are [some] texture compression, and splitting each world off into a separate web page.

The offline version will not have those limits, it doesn’t have to have them.

But the fact is the optimization for webGL also makes mobile ports potentially promising down the road… and this all could be pretty awesome.

I’m excited.

Updates, May 2023

First big thing you need to know is that Vivid Minigolf is being postponed to late summer 2023. I mean, it was already becoming obvious that Spring 2023 was unlikely, given the absence of any sort of Steam page, but now it’s even clearer.

I cannot guarantee online multiplayer as a summer feature, even. There is a build for that and for now it’s only implemented in one course, and even there it has some really tricky-to-solve bugs in certain cases. There are two courses out of seven that don’t even have fully implemented working hotseat modes, and it’s going to be a ton of work to complete and debug hotseat functionality for those two, even more to get all seven courses working in online multiplayer terms. So the probable launch timeframe now is some time in August. The price is likely to be $3.99 at launch. I’ve seen the strategy docs from other indie devs and pro-level developers too, and it’s clear that the ideal pricing for an indie title is usually in the $10-20 range or even for high end, more polished indies higher than that ($20-35). It’s been noted that overall, higher-priced indies make more total sales AND more cash per sale.

And that’s great BUT the more I consider this, the clearer it is that my goal with this was never to maximize income. I’m fine with a ‘failed’ launch [in business terms] and under 7000 wishlists at time of release. [which means not visibly appearing anywhere near top of ‘upcoming’ charts the week of release.]

My whole model of business is focused on underpricing, always has been. The reason my print services on Etsy are so popular is that they’re only half the price of other vendors AT MOST. This improves reviews, as people get better work from me than they expect. Prices need only be enough to break even plus a tiny extra margin that will allow me to keep building new product lines.

So know that I seriously considered prices ranging from $4.99-8.99 for a release of ‘Vivid Minigolf’ and settled on $3.99. It’s going to gradually drop from there too, during sales. I hope the reduced price results in more positive reviews and more impulse-buy sales, but who knows… I intend to lag the free version 30 months behind the paid version. Which is to say, if you wait for 2.5 years, everything I released for $3.99 will be available for free on VividMinigolf.com, i.e. early 2026. But by the time that’s happened I’m hoping the game will have had multiple substantial free DLC additions on the paid version on top of the initial launch, so that the paid version will always have some amount of new content that the free edition does not.

ETSY – I’ve had a rocky stretch here as I had to replace my large-format printer very recently. The purchase has pretty much wiped out my budget for the next month or so, which is a reason for not only a few delays for specific Etsy buyers in the past week but it also limits my options for the summer – I cannot easily complete my physics-sim toolset setup now, so despite some enthusiasm relating to that it must wait. In the meantime any ‘stock media’ focus will be on the texture and 3d asset updates, I’m overhauling a lot of the TACC2018 textures [the gigantic batch from 2013] and that is to say, many of the depth maps are improved to look more realistic, many textures AI-upscaled, all the seamless edges are consistent [automated actions in PS to clean seams in the exact same way for each texture where there’s inconsistency in seams between the different PBR maps], every texture exists in powers of two [eg. taking the occasional 750×750 texture and making it 1024×1024 or whatever]

Here are a few examples of textures – diffuse, opacity, displacement/normal, etc – applied to quads, out of the hundreds of materials included, these specifically are some examples in the ‘architecture’ category:

I’ve also got a ton of 3d assets in development and those updates, while delayed, are nearly there and should go live in early June now. The itch.IO asset collections are still selling reasonably well, enough to justify ongoing effort. I’ve spent hundreds of hours, hundreds of $ working on all this stuff and have made about $200 of that back – which isn’t ideal, but it’s enough support from all of you to be encouraging and to persuade me to keep trying. The most expensive part (in cash, not in time) was the stock footage, and I’ve been told it’s basically inadequate despite the effort, as the camera gear most of that was recorded on is not high enough resolution for it to be useful for any video VFX above 720p. In particular, the stuff in TACC2018, much of that’s SD quality and basically unusable for modern video, so it’ll be posted as freeware at about the same time the texture-collection update goes live. Basically, when one part of the collection is improved, another will go freeware. Seems reasonable.

Further sale activity on Etsy and Itch.IO will help me get a new physics sim pipeline fully up and running soon, so in theory I should be able to upgrade the VFX video elements, phasing out more and more of the older content into freeware packs, and making more of the new stuff accessible at the typical $1-3 price range per collection. I’ll also keep the Etsy listings expanding into new areas with new products posted. Some of what I had hoped for for Mother’s Day was not ready in time, due largely to the printer disruption, but should be in place around Memorial Day-Fathers Day. Memorial Day is May 29.

Please consider buying something then, and letting others know this stuff exists. I won’t have much of a promotional budget this summer which means my shops will depend on occasional search traffic and existing customer base, I’ll basically be throwing a game I spent hundreds of hours of work making, and $700+ in cash, out onto Steam with basically no promotion, no fanfare. I hope it goes well but it likely won’t. Still, I’ll update it and support it to whatever extent I am able to, even if the playerbase turns out to be very small. Know the obvious: The sales of bundles on itch.IO do include future indie games, not just massive piles of stock media for gamedevs. And that means you CAN preorder Vivid Minigolf and get a lot of extra for about $2.50 during Memorial Day. I think about 20 people have already done so.

LINKS FOR ANYONE WHO IS INTERESTED:

https://www.etsy.com/shop/MatthewLHornbostel

https://matthornb.itch.io/

Etsy shop is rebounding

Bouquets of paper flowers, in little mini pots. $4.49 each + shipping.

My Etsy shop was supposed to be leveling off and headed into the background, supposedly.

I raised pricing noticeably… to the extent that the shop is not only profitable but that margin is nearly doubled.

I also pretty much stopped promoting it with paid ad campaigns outside of Etsy.

Figured that would hold onto some of the existing, happy customer base, but not all of it, and limit the flow of new buyers, who in some cases are unpredictable, maybe difficult to deal with.

Well, what happened wasn’t a decline or a leveling off but a boom. The existing customers pretty much all kept ordering. And the new customers kept showing up despite my removal of ads leading into Etsy, but now the customers were arriving passively through Etsy itself at increasing rates. I realized that the reason was a temporary spike in the percentage of visitors who were buying, and apparently that metric spiking led Etsy as a platform to boost my listings and their visibility, including through the Etsy search ads you cannot opt out of. Beyond all this, my revenue has almost quadrupled, hitting $50-60/week in gains due to the pricing change, the lack of ad costs, and an uptick in buyers and to a lesser extent traffic generally. And… I’m just gonna roll with it now.

Yes, I’ve gotten a Cricut. Yes, I’m releasing a line of mini floral bouquets soon and they’ll start off at $4.49 each, then probably go up a bit once there are some reviews of them piled up. Most things on my Etsy are like that – the most underpriced stuff is almost always the stuff nobody is buying or reviewing yet.

I also have a ‘Greek architecture’ papercraft kit on the way, plus extension of all existing papercraft sets to O scale and T scale in about a month, and an upcoming option for precut kits at least with N, Z scale by June.

Yes, a few new paintings are being made. That’s not high priority but it’s still going on.

Yes, there was a Cinco De Mayo sale and everything was 15% off.

Yes, there’s a Mother’s Day sale coming up really soon (May 7-15) and everything will be at least 23% off throughout it. Some items are going to be over 30% off.

No, most sales in the future won’t have discounts quite that good.

Yes, I’m seeing 60 visitors daily on the shop lately. About half of them on any given day are probably new visitors.

Yes, I’ve had 75 people favorite the shop, up from 50 at the end of 2022.

And yes, I do have big plans elsewhere too. I’m working on some major stock media updates, for example, and a revised HornbostelVideos.com site design with a ton of additional video material, which goes live soon.

Thanks everybody, really excited about this actually and figure it’ll be a big deal in terms of overhauling and improving existing content and adding a lot of new things too.

One more note – an eBay auction is also going on, lots of action cameras in a bundle starting at $49 with no added shipping cost. Take a look here if interested.

Reopening Etsy physical shipments?

I am considering reopening Etsy printing services during Spring 2023 after all the moving is complete, ie by May 2023.

Some caveats:

-Minimal promotion of the Etsy shop. My aim is less to aggressively expand to new buyers who may or may not be happy with my work, and instead to focus on continuing fulfilling orders for the 50 or so repeat buyers who have generally been happy with what I’ve done and are usually easy to work with. These people have asked me to return and I’m genuinely considering doing so.

I spent *hundreds* promoting my Etsy in 2022 and many of the people who were drawn in were upset with the outcome for various often finicky reasons, demanded refunds. So by limiting active promotion, I not only expect to have a higher proportion of happy customers, and fewer upset one off people, but less promotional cost as well. This all makes the shop more likely consistently profitable and well regarded even if its rate of growth is limited, for 2023.

-Other notes, I still have a Greek papercraft kit in development, and several potential paintings. So the reopened physical items are not just shipped prints, BTW, they include the papercraft and handmade art as well – and better still, other new products that may surprise everyone. The copy paper will soon have a 13*19 option, a new cutting system for arbitrary sizes of prints will soon exist, there may even be a precut option for papercraft kits* pre scored with a Cricut!

Longer term, sizes above 13*19 are also possible. That will take a while to happen though. I do have plans to someday acquire a printer capable of printing up to 24″ by 48″, among other pretty cool things.

In other news: Yes, Vivid Minigolf is moving forward, yes it will be released by end of May 2023 barring a surprise huge setback. And while I am starting off with Steam, Itch.IO, Gamejolt… I may be adding the Epic Games Store to that list. Epic’s storefront is pretty huge, they’re making entry easier for indies now, and they only take 12% of sales, vs. 30% on Steam. So they will be a serious option to look at.

Prior to any of that: March 17, that’s six days from now, is St. Patrick’s Day, and on that day, just for 24 hrs, I’ll be doing another giant bundle sale through Itch.IO. Check that out here.

That is also when something new and cool might happen – that day may yet see:

-a patch and update to the furniture collection of 3d assets. (very likely, near certain)

-some new imagery relating to Vivid Minigolf (very likely)

-maybe even the launch, finally, of a Vivid Minigolf Steam Page? (somewhat likely)

That particular sale event could be really big for a few reasons. But mainly the fact that I’ve backed it with a $20 ad campaign and also some free link building efforts – posts on social media, YouTube comments, forum signatures, etc.

There’s also a little page on this site that’s seen a hundred views to date, focused on this exact sale event:

https://www.hornbostelproductions.com/sale/

So this could get interesting. I hope it goes well.

Ending Etsy Printing Services

The shippable items on Etsy are gone and I’m sure many of you noticed that.

At the moment only digital delivery products are still present there.

Maybe you are upset by this and want them back – I may offer them again at some point but no guarantees for now. If they do reappear that might be mostly on this site (the HornbostelProductions.com shop) instead of Etsy. That would mean similar pricing but more profitability as it would be outside of Etsy’s steadily rising fee structure.

Why would I ditch an Etsy product line that was taking off and proving highly successful? Well, there are three major reasons.

Etsy printing services are not super creative and not what I most want to be doing. Cutting that off allows me to focus more of my time on other projects. For example, game dev stuff, and the imminent launch of a massively expanded HornbostelVideos website.
Etsy wasn’t only time consuming, it was a bit stressful trying to ship batches of packages out on a daily basis. Other (digital) products are different in that I can step back from working on them when I’m getting upset/stressed instead of feeling like I have to keep working through the misery to get stuff out for the mail truck when it swings by.
Final note there is the fact that this year I’ll be moving to a new house. It’s in Sewickley, PA. So that move is going to disrupt any possible work and shipping regardless for the next 2-3 months.
I don’t need the Etsy money at this point, not really. I’ve gotten a mild boost in income in spots outside of Etsy so will likely be able to leverage THAT now instead of Etsy print sales and still make nearly the same amount. It’s enough cash saved or flowing in that I am in a good spot to complete things like Vivid Minigolf. That project, has two courses I still haven’t yet built or implemented, plus various remaining minor bugs across otherwise completed ones. But if I push on that now I can definitely still get it onto Steam by mid March 2023. For various reasons, I will ignore mainstream advice relating to Steam releases. There have been talks about how ‘optimal pricing’ for indie games is $15-20. Now in this case, I don’t care if the cash coming in is ‘optimal’. I mostly just want the game to be accessible and playable for people and I want players to have fun. I considered a $5.99 price point for a while but have shifted my views on this. Current price point at launch is now likely to be in the $3 range instead.

So basically:

Vivid Minigolf launch is early 2023, on Itch.IO and Steam at a price of $2.75. It will go on sale too with increasingly solid discounts as months pass, eventually dropping as much as 75-80% off which is to say, about 50 cents. Plus there will be DLC every once in a while, at no additional cost. There will also be a free version on the game’s official site which lags roughly a year behind the paid version in content terms. And it has a few ads spaced around it on the webpage. When the game first launches that free version will have one course included, so for the first year it’s essentially a demo. But at the end of year one, by that point the Steam version will have some free DLC and the free version will lag behind said DLC and just have the core seven courses. And so on. Eventually, by 2026 or 2027, DLC updates will likely be over and the free version will fully catch up with the paid one and at that point the ‘paid’ Steam game will go freeware. It’s up to you whether paying $2.75 at launch is worth it, or under $1 about nine months after that, or NOTHING AT ALL but you would need to wait four years.

Astounding Worlds (previously Panoramic Worlds) is now set up for status as an Itch.IO and AstoundingWorlds.com exclusive, free plus optional tip on Itch.Io, and free with a few ads on the official site. That and the minigames like Spiral Skies, Easely, Eracer, and Vortex, all will go live in Summer 2023. The entire batch will be accessible for $1 on Itch (or) free with ads on the official game site in the case of Astounding Worlds.

Miniature Multiverse should be ready to launch by November 2023. It will be priced similarly to Vivid Minigolf.

After all that, who knows? I’m open to going heavily into reimagining other backburner projects from World Pinball to Isola, to a Troop 4 adventure and some fangame stuff.

But the bottom line on all of this is it’s all greenlit and moving forward faster now. I can afford to get all these projects done. Watch for exciting updates ahead!

December 2022

A quick note on what looks to be the year’s final Etsy sale.

All printing services are going to be 25% off from Dec. 5 to Dec. 20.
Everything else is going to be 60% off. So, paintings, papercraft kits, stock media packs… all the things people normally don’t buy. Like for example, those three widely-ignored ‘3d level / app creation’ listings where I make a 3d environment based on someone’s rough sketched layout or batch of still photos? The ones where I agree to work for just over ten hours doing that, at a pay rate of under $3 per hour for my work in texturing and 3d and gamedev level design? Yeah, it is going down to just under a single dollar per hour of my time working. I am still pretty sure nobody will pay $10 for it, because if the public still hasn’t done anything with these listings by now they likely never will. Even the cheapest one, the gallery one that takes me 4 hrs. work to do, and goes on sale for $2 or $3 now and then… I don’t think anyone will ever buy it. Please SOMEBODY prove me wrong and demonstrate that you actually realize how insanely good that pricing is given the work involved!
I will post several new paintings on Etsy this month, They probably will sit there unpurchased for years. I know they’re kind of loose and impressionistic, I do get that, but at 60% off my paintings are about $1/hr pay for work involved on my part once materials are factored out. So again, ridiculous underpricing that nobody takes advantage of.
I am likely to attempt jumping into some niches that are already present on Etsy because every time I attempt selling a thing that’s truly unique and exceptional value nobody wants it. So for some reason that includes paper flower stuff (at max. $8 per mini bouquet) and pop up cards (gift tags) and so on. Still, being me I couldn’t help wanting to push each category closer to realism. So the petals and leaves of my paper flowers have photorealistic printed textures on the paper, and the gift tag pop ups are going to look unexpectedly richly detailed.
And a new niche that nobody has been messing with. 3d photos. I can take family photos and convert them into 3d extruded scenes using layer after layer of cut chipboard and printed photo material, to give the scene realistic depth. The depth extraction begins with AI depth map solver software and some common sense manual edits and refinements when needed, followed by a splitting of the grayscale map into roughly eight tonal sections, each with the corresponding portion of the photo separated using that depth mask. Then several hours printing, cutting, layering it all in a box. I will likely price each photo at about $8. You know the drill though, it is a thing nobody online will really ever realize is available, nobody understands it, probably nobody will ever buy it. That’s how this goes!
Yes, I am going to add more papercraft kits soon, starting with a Coastal Greek kit. Think ‘Santorini’ plus a few modular ruins and you get the idea. Granted, papercraft kits have sold but my most profitable one to date has never actually turned a profit, it always costs more to promote it than the sales that result.
Anything earned this December sale will be focused on setting up Christmas gifts for young children, family members that at this time I have no idea how to cover gifts for.
Family and friends and scattered acquaintances in fairly large numbers may all be gifted something truly odd this year beyond typical gift items. As in: 80 or 85 % off coupons, one use only, applicable to any item on my Etsy shop ASIDE from the printing services. If that works out it could trigger a batch of sales in Jan. 2023 and perhaps some subsequent reviews, resulting in momentum finally (I hope?) for the sort of items that thousands look at, hundreds favorite, and nobody actually ever buys. Because – sometimes – the only path to getting something moving is when the price is dropped to the $1 range or lower.

I still only have six listings which are typically profitable. Six of the 50+ listings are what keep the shop viable at all. You might think with Star Seller and 275+ sales it is going well but it has the potential to expand and become popular far more broadly in 2023. And if that starts soon, it helps in other ways too. I would *love* to net $750 in sales this December to cap off the year. It would result in $200-250 in pay which would be enough not just to make the holidays better for the nephews and niece, but beyond that could push things to a stable enough start in ’23 that maybe, just maybe, you will find all those long delayed gamedev things completed and launched on Steam earlier than you now expect.

This is not over yet… indeed, I get the sense it has all barely started.

Bad news and good news despite it

I’ve been so swamped with Etsy orders some of them have been sent out pathetically late. So… of $600+ in sales this month, roughly $200 of that total will be refunded, more with orders that were over a day or two later than estimated.

This of course means all pay and profit for the month is now gone, in my attempts to resolve all the piled up complaints. The month has had well over 100 hours of Etsy work involved and I’ve earned nothing.

Upside: the buyers are generally all getting the items they ordered, even if later than is acceptable. And they get usually anywhere from 30-55% of their order value refunded in problem cases.

Downside: This consumed a lot of time and cash on my end so that now I cannot reasonably give family members a decent Christmas this year AND realistically release a debugged version of Vivid Minigolf in 2022, so that little indie game is being delayed. It is being pushed back to a projected release on Feb. 23, 2023. This lets me get that launch done right even if it is later than everyone was hoping.

I can still pledge this: HornbostelVideos.com and TriumphantArtists.com will be nicely overhauled before the end of 2022, among several other sites. And yes, I know, they were supposed to be ready in mid October. But the Etsy chaos has delayed a lot of things.

The weirdest note though here is that it seems the economy is tanking fast or something. I saw the sale activity was frenzied for the first 2/3 of October and after that just kind of… drop off a cliff the past week starting Oct. 23… which is very weird. Possibly ominous. Especially given that the Etsy shop is now set with everything 15% off or more, and yet I went full 180 from insanely overloaded with orders to suddenly wondering where everyone went as soon as the sale began.

And it isn’t like there have been a pile of bad reviews so far. I managed to resolve most complaints at least passably, and the total number of ratings has gone up 18% since the month began. They’ve been still all positive somehow.

I am really unsure what is going on here.

And if you’re wondering, delays were NOT just me overloaded with orders.

At one point the printer flat out stopped working for a while, and only printed the cyan and yellow. I tried a ton of easy, then increasingly weird long shot fixes until hitting on one that (thankfully) worked, involving temporarily dismantling some parts in the printer and using Q tips dipped in distilled water to scrub specific areas in the printer. That printer malfunction delayed a bunch of orders and is responsible for a substantial chunk of the current delays.

Otherwise, nothing extremely odd. Just a few shipping and packaging issues, including a damp package that had to be redone/reprinted at one point (got wet because USPS didn’t pick it up in a timely manner, it just sat there for hours on end and was damaged) occasional lag and freezes in Photoshop, and a ton of stress trying to clear out the (still partially present) backlog of orders.

Yes, I am pulling two all nighters this week and yes, I am finally almost caught up with every order that has been placed.

I’m really sorry about how all this has played out for everyone. I tried to handle this well but things did not work out in anything close to an ideal way and I apologize for all the terrible missteps I have made here.

Update – new art, new listings and a big sale boom from Thanksgiving through Dec. 20.

Thanksgiving to Christmas:

15-20% off all printing services

40-50% off papercraft and handmade art on canvas

60-70% off digital products.

PLUS – extra 10% off orders above $35 WITH free shipping included too!

Or if the order is over $50 in value, the extra 10% savings grows to 15% (!) making this the best pricing on large orders in a LONG time. 35% off big print orders potentially!

I’ve run through a few tough challenges in October, order pileups and scattered delays, refunds, even fully replacing my printer. But now things are finally running smoothly again and I am so excited about how the future looks here. 🙂

https://www.etsy.com/shop/MatthewLHornbostel

Etsy status in October 2022 + other notes

Another week, another Etsy sale. Most of the time *something* is on sale on Etsy even if not the most popular items (ie printing services) and that’s intentional, it’s a rotation of items on sale from week to week. Some weeks multiple categories are discounted and on holidays everything is discounted HEAVILY. This October has been an anomaly: more sales made the first half of October 2022 than the first half of the year 2021. A twelvefold increase in frequency of sales! That of course makes it something of a challenge to keep up. I try to get every order out on time of course but occasionally things do arrive late especially during sale events or when a HUGE order has been placed.

This month has seen $450 in sales and it hasn’t even hit the halfway mark!

So that is astounding, even if 67-72% of it is getting eaten up by materials and shipping supplies and so on. I even am releasing new print products now like (very cheap, my cheapest material) prints on copy paper and small print items like bookmarks!

The Halloween rush is going to be deranged in its level of activity. I’m pretty sure of that. I am of course setting a lot of other tasks aside to stay focused on fulfilling Etsy orders for the rest of October. A few things still get some attention though – one being the ongoing work on Vivid Minigolf. I aimed for a ‘late 2022’ release and still am hoping to get that done successfully.

Southwest desert course in Vivid Minigolf

Japanese Garden minigolf course (most of it visible, anyway – the image is cropped, not just resized)

Any success via Etsy will slow down the first release of the game slightly but will also give it a stronger shot at visibility when it does get released. Right now I’ve built courses, implemented features, am actively debugging the game… all the mini supply materials involved were covered months ago, the software side of things and the Steam fee are covered too. But that leaves me with a bit of a challenge in gaining publicity at time of release.

Should Halloween prove effective in generating sales activity, it will give me a bigger promotional budget to work with which in turn may have a multiplier effect if used well, in that this title might appear somewhere on the lists of popular releases. Ideally first page of Itch with no scrolling down the list, maybe a bit of scrolling on Steam but not too much? That kind of thing helps people notice that a game exists! I will be messaging a (fixed) list of Youtubers and game news sites with download keys, of course, and my policy is not to hand out keys to anyone not on that top-100 list. I know random people will claim to be a popular Youtuber, ask for free keys, and then resell them on the cesspool that is G2A, it’s a common tactic. I’m just not going along with that, in general.

Other than the PR kit, the key distribution / mailing effort… a better YouTube trailer and more and more gameplay clips by time of launch… and my ongoing manual commenting on minigolf related videos on YT (I think I’ve linked to the game project on something like a hundred of the more popular YouTube minigolf videos at this point) I will also run a massive $150+ ad campaign across Google/YouTube, several banner ad networks, Twitter ads, Facebook/Instagram, and Bing/Yahoo search. I have already fine tuned with the initial $25 – am confident I can make over 5 million (generally, relevant) people aware that this game exists when it launches. This is in terms of *impressions* of course and it will probably translate to at most 1% of that group clicking through, and probable 1-3% of that 1% buying the game. In theory, then, we’re talking 500-1500 sales over time which… anything in that range would be amazing if it pans out. We are talking $1000-3000 there, factoring in the reality that many of the buys will be during sales and that Valve gets a 30% cut.

If that happens though, great potential for free updates over that first year of release. The core seven courses only involved $500 in materials, $200 in Steam submission and software expenses specific to the project, $150 or more promoting the thing at launch. Not to mention hundreds of hours of work as an indie with no actual pay rate.

So if this goes well, great! The target of $1000 in sales pretty much means breaking even on this project, and every $1000 or so above that means maybe some new features added, and an extra 5-6 courses posted in a free update to all players who bought the game.

I have thoughts about revising the game features to include, for example, randomly mixed 18-hole courses. Either a front nine/ back nine selectable combo or just 18 completely randomly selected holes. That is one of those things which would involve a lot of reworking of code to implement (like online multiplayer functions, multiplayer beyond hotseat) but which I would like to do in an update in early 2023. I also want to port this to mobile devices, touchscreen UI and all that. And I want to build AI opponents somehow as an option, even though that is tricky to do well.

I get it, you would all prefer these features exist at the outset. But I am a solo indie game developer. It takes time and cash to add all of this. I don’t have immense resources going in and I am hoping you all understand this. A game with a dev budget below $1k and an unpaid solo dev, is not going to be the most impressive thing ever, but if there is an audience for this, if people buy it and are patient, I will take that support seriously and do what I can to build amazing things with it in the next year.

Links relating to all of this:

http://www.vividminigolf.com

https://www.etsy.com/shop/MatthewLHornbostel

Thanks for everything!

Vivid Minigolf moving forward

More news and an updated site design will arrive soon, but for now just know that the project is making massive progress.

Main menu – Vivid Minigolf free version, feature limited [WIP]

Vivid Minigolf – first hole of the first [flower garden] course in the free demo.

In other news: The Etsy Labor Day sale is active. (Until the end of Sept. 10)

Everything 15+% off, some items up to 50% off!
Over 100 reviews of the shop now
Over 210 sales have been made to date
$2 of every $10 in sales go to worthwhile charitable causes during this sale in particular.
Anything somehow earned [despite] discounts and donations, will help get Vivid Minigolf launched successfully before the end of November 2022.

There’s also a sale on matthornb.itch.io if you’d prefer that.

Promised web network overhaul begins now!

There were some domains still stuck in HostGator’s clutches, and they’re basically about to be lost completely over the next few months.

So here are the replacement domains:

–AstoundingWorlds.com (replacing Panoramic Worlds, rebranding it over the next few days and setting its release as ‘Q1 2023’)

–T4Houston.com (replacing the old Scout Troop 4 site)

–RedeemerChurch3d.com (new Church of the Redeemer related site, more focused on the virtual-tour project.)

–Isola3d.com (replacement site for the old gamedev attempt ‘Isola’ which I might still rework someday as a realtime 3d game in Unity if things go well enough to make that happen.)

Some domains stay the same in domain-name terms. But a lot of them will be transformed and redesigned in surprising and ambitious ways… complete with updated content and design.

Noteworthy changes will begin with TriumphantArtists.com, and HornbostelVideos.com (which is now SSL secured and has an https but same domain otherwise) – both of which have extensively redesigned versions nearly ready to release to the world.

Also: There’s a new ad system built into a lot of these sites. Not all of them – some will remain entirely ad-free for IP/ownership reasons like the Troop 4 site, Redeemer site, & Myst series fansite, but most other sites like CrowdsourcedAdventure.com, VividMinigolf.com, and MiniatureMultiverse.com might have some ad slots in places. Maybe at times that’s just links to stores where a game or product can be bought, but often banners are present randomly mixing links and previews of various sites in the network.

I’ve set up an entire banner rotation system, internally. It’ll randomly display links with images in a way that’s far less code-heavy than the old cumbersome method I sometimes chose.

I’ll also be including some third-party ads on a few sites. These are from ComicAd.net, and mostly are other peoples’ comic/art/gaming related stuff.

Some third-party analysis measures the value of my sites as high as $900-1100 (in certain cases) ie. the market value of a successful and widely viewed domain I acquired for $12-15 originally like, say, TriumphantArtists.com, is likely worth close to a thousand dollars on the online auction market now. (The buyer, presumably, would just fill the domain with ads and run it into the ground and turn a profit even having spent $900+ buying it)… I don’t want to do that. I think – and maybe I’m a total idiot for thinking this – that burning an asset to the ground for one year of cash is idiotic, and I’d rather build a long-term business that generates small amounts of revenue every year for a decade or more. Short-term thinking is dumb. Long-term planning? Better.

The pursuit of immediate quarterly gains is what’s wrong with the world IMO. We are so fixated on ‘making money now’ that we miss the fact that we’re trashing the planet by doing so. Why can’t we accept slower growth that’s sustainable and humane long-term? Why does every business have to be about RIGHT NOW? Why, even, should the purpose of any business be to make money? Why can’t there be other types of business ventures where all the earnings are repurposed for good instead of just… hoarded? I’m the stupid one, maybe, but I just don’t get the logic in the way the world currently works. It seems all so damned inexplicable to me how we allow empathy-less monsters to always rise to the top of everything, and congratulate and reward their narcissism and greed.

But okay… my next big release is Vivid Minigolf. Not because it’s my best maybe or my most promising, but I think I can get it out there in the next three months, and do so fairly well.

I’m tossing this out there: Any purchases [of anything of mine] made during my Labor Day Sale on Etsy, will be at least 15% off usual price… plus for every $10 in sales made, $2 minimum will be donated to the Against Malaria Fund. This is a super effective charity that is well-regarded, efficient, basically saves at least one human life for every $200 allocated to it.

I’d love to see that Labor Day Sale (now set for Sept. 1-10, 2022) go huge… a lot of work for me and I’ll be earning maybe 25-50 cents per hour doing it, between the donations and the discounts, pretty much no net gain at that point but that kind of is the purpose of it. I want my work to matter. I want to make a statement that shops on the web can do more than earn money.

And when I mentioned Vivid Minigolf? Yeah, I’m giving away 25% of every purchase made. I’ll try to be transparent on this: the release plan includes a $100 Steam payment, $300+ in miniature crafting supplies, and at least three months of Construct 3 use at $20/month. Plus over 200 hours of my unpaid work… and $150 of my own earnings put into a launch promotional campaign.

Estimated cost of release, ignoring the work involved, is around $500. While I would love to make most of it back, I don’t expect to. That’s okay – it’s a good experience.

But if I did see it unexpectedly succeed… it could change the world in some modest ways.