stock media – Hornbostel Productions Blog & Shop

Halloween Etsy sale active!

In acknowledgement of the fact that the October Halloween sale is going on, and that all Etsy items are temporarily 30+% off, I’ve updated the sale info page of this site accordingly:

Astonishing Etsy Bargains! (hornbostelproductions.com)

It seems to be a big deal somehow – 90 people, sometimes over a hundred, are showing up each day now that the sale’s begun. And yes, this sale event encompasses my birthday. I’m turning 37 this October. I’m getting old.

If you want this to be a good birthday for me, or a good Christmas for my family, or you just want to make me able to donate more to *actual* worthy causes, want to help with my launching of more completed projects (videos, video games, stock media packs, new print products, papercraft sets, whatever it is I’m doing or working on that’s going to make backing the shop worthwhile in your eyes, well, you can get some AWESOME discounts right now on a wide range of things you’ll love to have, while also helping me to further goals I care about and that will assist my family, friends, and the world.

MatthewLHornbostel – Etsy

Thanks so much, everyone!

Here are some greeting cards that are one of the many things on sale that’ve taken off suddenly like crazy despite the fact that I only released them very recently. These big, glossy greeting cards are currently a dollar each:

One dollar per card! Less for a three-pack! And I’ll include an envelope with any future cards in the mailer, a big one that can hold what is admittedly a larger than typical Christmas card.

Just released, nobody’s bought one yet, but these 6″ by 9″ sticker name tags (for trick or treaters) are on sale under $1 each. They can have whatever name[s] and text color you want, so easy stuff for tacking onto a candy container for people on the street to identify the name of your little ghost/goblin if that’s useful.

It astonishes me just how rapidly this listing took off. There are a dozen people with custom bookmarks in cart at the moment, on my Etsy shop. But not too hard to understand why. A lot of people want custom bookmarks and either have their own designs or want one put together. And at under $1 for a bookmark plus shipping, the current sale pricing on this listing is really hard to ignore. The prices even drop steadily from there as the number of copies rises, currently going under $0.40 per bookmark (!) with sufficient volume, during the sale.

Also, there’s a super-colorful preset batch of bookmarks, with my own archive of art paintings printed differently on front and back of eight. No customization but it’s under $1.50 during this sale – for a set of EIGHT of these art bookmarks.

The four above examples? They’re just a few of the 50+ active listings. Seriously, go look at the shop right now, it’s crazy how good the pricing is on everything for the rest of October 2023.

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

A recently posted new painting. Acrylic on canvas. Mojave desert imaginary scene. On sale, 45% off. $15 + shipping.

The best ‘promotional boost’ package there, is now on sale at just $45. That bundle includes a shipment of 250 double-sided business cards with your design or a custom one built in Photoshop based on your input, hundreds of custom flyers, plus an online promotion to 75,000+ people via search and banner ads, from someone who actually has some experience in making that stuff work in finding people. I mean, you ran across my site, didn’t you? 😉

The stock media stuff has struggled out of the gate – there’s a scathing review of the video VFX pack which ultimately has been pulled off the shop to be redone completely at some point. The textures have some (far fewer, but some) issues as a collection too, but a HUGE update’s due to the collection within the next 20 days. An update that’s been in the works seemingly forever but… it involves over a hundred more materials and scattered enhancements to the first thousand textures in the collection which bring those up fully to modern standards. As PBR surfaces, they’ll just look better, which has to do with a ton of careful manual editing I’m doing, and some clever cutting-edge AI processes for upscaling and depth solving. As for the video (VFX) collection and that – the only negative review I have on my Etsy account out of 180+ total reviews… yeah, it’s true, many of those clips are pretty much unusable these days. Standard-def footage is useless to many video editors and is, as stated, blurry. Set aside the several ‘shaky’ clips that are not easily usable for that reason and the main issue is resolution/blurriness of the bulk of the material. You all, I spent a few hundred $ shooting all that stuff but much of it is years old. Like, in some cases, as old as 2011-2013. So yeah, the budget-range cameras of that era were not good enough to grab footage useful by modern standards. It’s why much of that stuff’s gone freeware at this point on https://matthornb.itch.io [the TACC2018 page] and I hope you don’t hold that older video material against me.

That said: I am working towards some modern 3d rendered physics-sim elements in 4k so hopefully when that is out it’ll make up for the flaws of the old stuff. Well, that and the texture and 3d asset pack updates inbound.

And I’m still working on a HornbostelVideos website update and it’s been slow in coming but I think I’ve got the design right this time. It’s a very tricky thing, setting up a video site that needs to not only hold close to a hundred videos with room to grow from there, but in a way that is intuitive to navigate AND has to be responsive, i.e it must read clearly even on a cheap phone screen that’s as little as 300-400 pixels wide. I’ve currently got the new design set up to look good on low res screens, medium res, and high res full-HD. I won’t advise you to watch on your phone, I’d prefer a good tablet or iPad or a desktop/laptop but people do watch stuff on phones and I have to be able to handle that!

News on numerous fronts will be posted here between now and the end of 2023. Keep an eye out for cool stuff. That’s all for now I guess.

September – recovering

The Etsy Labor Day sale was not super successful. Indeed, the data-recovery efforts mentioned earlier – getting new external hard drive storage media and downloading cloud backup files back to local storage where they can again be used… plus some other assorted work, costs and issues resulted in delayed payment of a few bills and certain things going down visibly, including the Etsy shop itself for a few days post-sale, and the website MiniatureMultiverse.com which hit its expiry date but was still well within the ten-day grace period when I renewed the domain. Both bills have since been covered and things have indeed stabilized around here.

While customers online have continued to buy things at a gradually growing rate, the really key thing here has been the support of family and in-person connections. I am being paid by my sister Katie to do videography at her upcoming wedding, for example, and am assisting my dad with illustrations on his workbook (a church small-group workbook he’s putting together based on the Spirit of the Disciplines by Dallas Willard, I’ll show some of that later…) and all of that I’ve been really trying to do well. I’ll show more of that material soon. In practice, that means over $300 made in the past week between those things and a few sales online.

I’m even doing 3d-animated menu stuff for Katie’s wedding DVD and BluRay, based on what her wedding and reception sites look like:

It’s not enough pay to be outright transformative, but it absolutely did get things back on track a bit and it did allow me to cover some new stuff which will result in some things moving forward a bit more. I’m optimistic now, for example, that the stock-media packs I’d planned will be available by Halloween 2021, along with an initial launch of Panoramic Worlds. I’ll also have the first asset pack of mine on Unity’s Asset Store by then, assuming they actually have enough sense to see that it’s good, and approve it.

I am actively making more artworks, listing them on Etsy. Don’t be surprised if there are over 45 listings total on the shop by November 2021… and over 60 by the end of 2021.

That will be not just MANY paintings but also a LOT more papercraft listings showcased with some lovely new dioramas – the urban inspirations for the new sets are Venice, Paris and Amsterdam, so that gives you some sense of what’s planned by end of 2021. I may even have a couple of Greek sets up by the end of the year with both modern Greek structures and ancient Greco-Roman ruins and structures. In case you wanted to make an ancient Rome or Athens and not just stuff from the medieval or later eras. There are a bunch of mini supplies inbound largely for this purpose and a number of those materials may yet find secondary use in wrapping up the physical assembly of remaining areas in ‘Miniature Multiverse’ as well.

HERE ARE MORE NEW PAINTINGS, SEEN ON ETSY:

Lighthouse artwork -this painting sold within just four hours of being listed.

Hummingbird painting – also on stretched canvas

Basically, things are improving for me. And despite some depressing missteps a few days ago, and my opining that I might never have a career success at all given the risk of climate-change related collapse over the next 25 years, right now things are looking up. And while I still believe environmental issues could cause a massive wave of volatility and instability in the coming years, for now I’m feeling like the end of 2021 and the start of 2022 might not be terrible. I might actually have a shot at some sort of success here, and I’d love it if that meant I were able to help people struggling with lack of access to food, medicine, education, etc – all the people already on the brink in this world, who’ll face tremendous adversity as things start to unravel. These people will need our help. Nature, too, will need our help. We will have to dig deep and make sacrifices for everyone and indeed for the planet itself, if the world is to hold together in the coming crisis. And I want to believe that America and Americans can show global leadership, instead of petty tribalism, greed, short-sightedness, and self-absorption. To that end I’ve begun giving more to charitable causes this month than I was even earlier this year… raising the giving level from around 11% of my monthly budget to 23%. I want to make the world better. And I’m hoping that I can do so while also still making creative work that you all will love, at a rate that’s unprecedented. If things continue improving, there’s no reason I couldn’t continue to push my giving upwards as well, which I would love to be able to do.

If you like that idea please continue to support my work – buying on Etsy, Itch.IO, etc – and ideally also reviewing what you’ve bought. Next sales are Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and I think you’ll be excited to see what will be available during those events. Or – you know – you can also buy things quickly at full price if they show up and look interesting. Like what a recent buyer did with the lighthouse art – they saw something they liked, a one-off unique item – and they immediately grabbed it instead of waiting and running the risk somebody else would claim it.

Etsy & Itch.IO sales, August 2021

I had mentioned in my last post that I was aiming to get three new collections posted on Itch.IO shop by Labor Day, plus a launch of ‘Panoramic Worlds HD’. These collections include a 3d-asset sci-fi and a medieval/fantasy collection BUT also a big VFX elements pack.

That VFX elements pack, I have a few possible outcomes for. The lowest-end outcome would involve a ackage of 20-odd digital effects – rigid-body dynamics debris blasts/falls and a mix of explosion FX that are simulated. But if you want an additional 25+ clips of real stuff in the mix, from dirt bursts to debris and splashes and cloud tank stuff potentially, well, I have a contingency plan for that but it’ll cost me about another $150 to do it right, $150 I currently do not have in place.

That $150 is almost entirely a mix of additional debris materials, the aforementioned water tank setup, a waterproof case, and camera lenses. I’ve already got a viable camera that can do this stuff at high quality 120fps – though if you really want pristine footage and the amount raised is close to $300, I can trade out my camera system and push that to be a bit better as well. Though, I’m unsure if that’ll happen.

The catch: The budget is locked in by Aug. 16 – so any funding raised after that will not be in time to meaningfully change the scope of the asset pack. That pack is launched by Sept. 1 so… any materials that I order in the last 2 weeks before package launch are going to be a bit too late.

SO HERE’S MY OFFER FOR AUG. 10-15:

-WHILE THERE’S NO NEW ITCH.IO SALE FROM ME SO CLOSE TO LABOR DAY, recall [firstly] that Ko-fi payments sent to me do include all existing asset packs I’ve got on Itch.IO plus any future Itch.IO packages. And for now, those Ko-fi payment minimums are very low. As in, $2.25 to buy ALL MY STOCK MEDIA PLUS ALL STOCK-MEDIA and ITCH.IO GAME FUTURE UPDATES.

https://ko-fi.com/s/77537ed3e4 – click here to take advantage of the new $2.25 Ko-fi deal directly.

–Second, everything on Etsy is about to go on sale and not always discounted to the same extent. The digital products on Etsy are going to hit 45% off from Aug. 10-15, 2021. That’s mainly some print-your-own miniature papercraft kits in a mix of scales. But if you opt to order anything physical on Etsy it’ll be 25% off [and] will include a free download link to all the content I have on Itch.IO. As in, that same $2.25 deal is included with all Etsy physical-item orders for a span of the next six days!

And remember, the Etsy link is here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/MatthewLHornbostel

A quick note for the end of July…

Firstly, the July 4th sale went okay but mostly was underwhelming in terms of public response.

Nonetheless, I continue to push forward on more ambitious new product releases as much as I am able.

Between now and the Labor Day sale (which is sept. 1-10, 2021) I intend to release a bunch of new art items on Etsy, plus three more asset packs on itch.IO. Plans include:

-a substantial and high quality new 2.7k video VFX elements pack on https://matthornb.itch.io/

(the creation of this pack will cost at least a couple hundred $ doing a wide range of various debris bursts/falls, involving a mix of different materials, different types of FX stuff, maybe some good smoky billowing cloud tank FX too if this goes well, and that budget, of $200ish which is… roughly what I have available at the moment, and the way I want to do it – bigger and better -will be about $75 -$125 above that, so any support in the form of Etsy or Itch.IO orders in the next week or so will make it possible to do this better, with an even wider range of effects elements. But it has to be roughly within the next 20 days, by Aug. 20 or so, past that point, the scope of the collection will kind of be locked in and won’t change meaningfully between then and the Sept. 1 launch. )

-a new medieval/fantasy 3d asset pack there too. Think modular castles – interiors, exteriors – smaller structures, and many different middle ages period details filling all of them. At least 20 3d assets included at first launch.

-and a scifi pack as well with SF themed 3d assets. Sort of a mix of the darker gritty cyberpunk stuff and some cleaner / glossy future designs too, plus some alien / outer space environment elements. Again, well over 20 different 3d objects/assets included from the get go.

And those three new asset packs will have very nice preview images and materials showcasing them effectively. Which they should have, given that they’re each priced around $2.50 or so.

But: despite this accumulating mass of epic-scaled asset packs closing in on a $30 combined price, and fast approaching 3000 total files across all of them, don’t assume that you won’t still be able to find great deals from me anymore during holidays! Labor Day 2021, Halloween 2021, Thanksgiving and Christmas 2021 all will have the bundle of all my itch.IO products together for over 90% off the normal cost (i.e. under $3 for everything released to date)

That – the trio of entirely new packs – is on top of some new, and fairly substantial free additions to a few of my existing asset packs, my first submission to the Unity Asset Store, about a dozen more listings on Etsy bringing the total to 30+ listings… a relaunch and redesign of several websites including HornbostelVideos, and the release of a little adventure game called ‘Panoramic Worlds‘ across multiple platforms.

Yes, a lot is going on around here.

Some new Etsy items have already been posted, in fact.

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

Like this painting, or a brand new second set of model buildings, which will be visible in a preview image very shortly on NScaleScenery.com! (in the next 36 hrs! with the actual sale listings across multiple model scales posted for sale on Etsy within 36hrs after that!) This is a big deal! So much has been in the works here these last few weeks and I am hoping that as the results of that effort start to go public you will be thrilled by it all! 😀

Halloween Sale 2020

A mailbox from ‘Street Details’ asset pack.

Fire hydrant from the same new asset pack

Free bonus 3d asset pack, .FBX and .OBJ assets, decals, and textures released for the Halloween Sale.

Acrylic forest Artwork – one of several new items posted on Etsy leading up to the sale.

So basically here’s where things stand:

I’ve hoped for a truly massive pile of orders placed over the Etsy / Itch Halloween sale [Oct. 27th to Nov. 3] but the response has been… less than stellar so far.

Granted, there have been a few dozen visitors showing up on https://matthornb.itch.io during this event, but generally, this sale underscores what I’ve been sensing for a while, namely that the itch asset-pack stuff is not working and neither is my Etsy stuff, for the most part. My inclination at this moment is to minimize further future updates to that material and focus almost entirely on actual gamedev efforts on Itch [and also on GameJolt and Steam].

Now, if the goals are still reached unexpectedly [anything close to the $250 sales total target] I’ll still make major stock media updates, but if things continue to underwhelm I’ll probably limit that. Instead I’ll focus this month of November on earnings in more reliable venues [eg microtasking like mTurk even though the tasks available pay only $1-3 per hour most of the time] instead of focusing on making added asset pack content since clearly not many people are interested in that anyway.

Here is the likely scenario assuming the sale continues to fail badly:

—Late 2020, focus on microtasks, tedious stuff that could pull in about $250 – $300 more by year end, plus a few small updates to Itch.IO asset packs, consisting of about 15 more 3d assets and 20 more texture maps.

–Q1 2021, I’d get the promised minigames all out there. I’m going with free and paid variants of these. The paid variants are usually a bit higher res graphically with a few more cosmetic options, but otherwise the same.

–Q2 2021, Panoramic Worlds [both free and paid versions] launched.

–Q3 2021, Miniature Multiverse released.

—Q4 2021, Vivid Minigolf released.

-Early 2022 focus on a few freebies including the Redeemer VR tour, the fangames, etc. But only if things have gone well enough on the commercial releases to take this stuff off the backburner in between the first wave of games and the later reworking of Isola for realtime 3d by late 2022.

If the sale suddenly improves and unexpectedly goes really well by the time it ends on Nov. 3, all this changes a bit:

-Late 2020 would be focused on more game assets, and releasing those to all asset-pack buyers, including 50+ new 3d assets, 100+ new texture maps, and some Unity-compatibility updates. This would all ramp up into sales on Thanksgiving and Christmas 2020 which in this scenario would be actively promoted like this current Halloween sale has been. If the Halloween sale surprises me and goes well by the end that’d bode well for the other 2020 sales onwards as well, which would mean I’d have the minigames, Panoramic Worlds, Miniature Multiverse, Vivid Minigolf all launched by August of 2021 and the rest of it by December 2021. I think this really is possible but at this juncture it seems less and less likely to work. I keep pointing this out but… if I had even another $100 a month across all these sources, it’d more than double my gamedev budget per year, AND speed up the production by about 40-50% simply due to my not diverting time to the aforementioned low-wage microtasks. Every dollar you spend on my stores speeds up development of my actual creative work by roughly one hour. Really.

Labor Day Weekend Sale

All of my SALE content online – INCLUDING NEW 3d ASSETS – ARE ABOUT TO BE DISCOUNTED TWICE! First, LAbor Day WEEKEND, Sept. 4-7, 2020! And again WITH THE SAME GREAT DEALS for Halloween 2020, Oct. 29-31!

https://matthornb.itch.io/ – On Labor Day weekend, from September 4th to 7th, I’ll offer 50% off all my [already underpriced] stock media asset packs, and 90% off all of them in a single bundle! So for just $1, you can get 1600+ seamless tiling texture maps, 160+ video VFX elements, 120+ 3d assets! More now there than ever before – I’ll be posting an added 20+ 3d objects, in both FBX & OBJ formats, and 100 new texture maps across all those collections, between now and Sept. 1, 2020. This is the single best part of the Labor Day sale. But there are other cool things going on sale then, and the deal will repeat for Halloween 2020 as well, about 45 days later. There’s a ton of amazing stock media here… and it can save you a ton of work if you’re an indie game dev, or a video creator or some other type of digital / 3d or VFX artist.
This site shop, HornbostelProductions.com – I’m offering a staggering 15% discount across the shop for those two huge sales timeframes. This is in addition to all the other discounts available for loyal customers. Pretty much any customized art variant you might want is available, but not just personalized artworks – I also have stock media DVDs and other amazing deals, including made-to-order game levels! (Not joking at all, this is great for those of you who have zero skill in 3d art – this is an offshoot of another thing I’m doing at CrowdsourcedAdventure.com and you may want to give it a look. You can place an order for a 3d level / gameworld made to order – you provide your ideas, I sculpt them into 3d content, and together we’ll form a beautiful finished 3d environment that is explorable, and which I’ll ship directly to you! This, like the personalized handmade art listings, could make a memorable gift for any significant occasion!)
My Etsy Shop [Handmade, handcrafted acrylic paintings at really low pricing!] The items I’ve listed on Etsy are going to include more than half a dozen new paintings, added in the weeks leading up to the first sale, and all the old art items will be discounted 20% throughout the sale, new ones by 10%. When the sale ends, I’ll take the unsold old items and auction them off on eBay. Unfortunately, a lot of my eBay buyers are still seemingly unaware that almost everything I sell on eBay I also sell cheaper elsewhere. (Not their fault, really – eBay doesn’t allow outbound URLs so many people who find me via eBay never realize most of my stuff isn’t sold there and what is there is more expensive lately.) Generally, I can, for fee reasons, offer the best possible prices on my own shop (here on HornbostelProductions) or with digital-only shops (Itch.IO) but there’s usually 7% higher pricing on Etsy, and almost 20% higher on eBay, largely because of all the fees involved on those platforms.
My eBay shop – I won’t mince words. I saw a fiasco earlier this year, way more so than anything on Etsy. A wave of Q1 2020 buyers – arguably, scammers – took advantage of my defective and far too trusting refund policy that allowed full refunds on sold items, including high-value ones ‘for any reason’ without photographic evidence of any actual item damage, or any evidence of claimed loss or misdelivery. Once a wave of items sold and had to mostly be refunded due to certain buyers’ greed, I found myself in a position where I genuinely did not have the cash on hand to ship out the second wave of legitimate orders that followed in any sort of remotely timely manner. Worse, as delays have mounted the amount of additional swag sent as my apology to each of those poor irritated long-suffering honest buyers has climbed. As of August 2020, the last of these delayed legitimate orders are finally being resolved, with full refunds being sent out plus extra and also the items requested being shipped with extras included. I will be shipping out the last packages [plus some extra stuff & a full refund] to each and every one of them, by August 25, 2020. My successful clearing of the order backlog coincides with the launch of some new eBay listings finally, and unfortunately a less lenient refund policy and slightly higher pricing in the future. I wasn’t convinced to do this by the fact that I made hundreds of sales over half a decade with no profit in all that time. Rather, the final straw was seeing my ability to provide good customer service to decent customers, being dragged down by my lack of any sort of emergency reserves. Being able to deliver all of what I promised to all of you, at a price that’s really reasonable, is important to me. And this mess on eBay was a disaster in that [delivery and customer service] regard. And I am genuinely sorry about that.

The eBay incident caused immense damage to my reputation as a seller and to my own financial status, not to mention months’ worth of delays inflicted on my indie game project ‘Miniature Multiverse’ due to the hundreds of dollars I’ve lost there in 2020. I will continue to emphasize that eBay seller fees mean that eBay items are always going to cost more than the equivalents on any other storefront I’ve got. Plus, from here on out, refunds will require photographic evidence or tracking data showing the package was not delivered successfully. And you know what, you might opt to choose eBay anyway and still pay the premium instead of buying stock media on itch, or art on HornbostelProductions because my eBay account has run longer and has ‘social proof’ insofar as there are 387 positive ratings [100% positive still, like on Etsy, despite my enormous missteps in 2020] on my account there. But eBay is now the weakest choice available for my products and I want to remind everyone of that. You’d be generally smarter to buy my content anywhere else.

A typical example of an item of mine – an older one – currently on Etsy.

My stock media DVD – available on HornbostelProductions.com and eBay but cheapest on itch.

Less than 1% of my texture maps/ materials [examples via itch]

Again, the shop links are:

-https://matthornb.itch.io/
– HornbostelProductions.com –My Etsy Shop
My eBay shop

Other notable links of mine include but aren’t limited to:

–TriumphantArtists.com

–MiniatureMultiverse.com

Thank you so much for reading! Hope you have a great day, and I hope that if you decide to buy anything from any of my stores, that you’re thrilled with how the purchase turns out!

Crowdsourced Adventure

A new domain – and a new game – are active right now.

CrowdsourcedAdventure.com.

The site includes a small ‘Myst like’ gameworld with four simple puzzles. It’s playable right now. [As of Aug. 4, 2020] and between active player support via Ko-fi, and more passive indirect player support via banner ads, I’m hoping to raise a ton of cash not merely to finance the development of the game over time – which I’ll do at a ridiculously low pay rate – but also to give to worthwhile charitable causes, and creative productions, beyond my own in the the broader gaming scene.

All Ko-fi support – every $4 – backing this also gives you as a supporter some cool benefits, not least the entire set of the stock media and other content I have on my itch.io page. [a $14.45 value] plus you’ll be able to contribute ideas of things you want in the future worlds of the game. [And you can have your text message added into the game, 30 character limit, could be your name, username, a URL, whatever.

For those who are wondering when my next sale is, it’s on Labor Day 2020.

Check my Etsy and Itch.IO shops then. There’ll be some fantastic discounts that day only, [Sept. 7, 2020, for those unclear on when Labor Day is.]

February 2020, updates

Some of you may have noticed a problem with my eBay shop lately. Things are taking longer to deliver. Orders do, in some cases, take weeks to fulfill.

That has much to do with my bare-bones financial condition. I’ve made a lot of artworks and am shipping them as soon as I can, but even so the delays continue to escalate as some customers have requested and been given, refunds. Note that even in these cases I still will fulfill their orders, it’s kind of important to me even if it makes zero difference to eBay, but… the last two weeks I’ve been scraping through huge piles of sub-minimum wage tasks in an aim to finish shipping all delayed orders. My losses [all factors considered] on eBay in the past 40 days are in excess of $70 which makes me a rather godawful excuse for a business person but maybe not a truly horrendous ‘person’ person?

I’ve been doing a ton of stuff on mTurk and other places, every gig I can grab, at $2-3 per hour, including low-end tasks I’d normally not touch, in an effort to stabilize things and resolve complaints from customers, complaints that have piled up badly.

You need to know that I’m working on it, working very hard to shovel my way out of the broken mess I’m now stuck in. Much of that low wage work’s already done, I do see some delays/lag as likely though as the tasks are still being approved and shifted out to a usable form of money. But I’ve earned $10+ daily doing that and it seems to be piling up faster than the refunds are going out. So sending refunds *and* shipping all of the ordered items, should be viable in the next week at most.

Upsides: my Itch.IO profile has seen a gradual climb in sales even despite total absence of reviews from buyers there. Even comments here and there would be enormously impactful FYI, the only feedback I have ever gotten was a comment on one Itch stock-media pack that said the collection was a great deal. Which explains why that one pack is accounting for about 60% of all my sales on Itch!

Also, I’ve made a second sale on Etsy, so it seems that is going well and I’m posting three new artworks soon, later than I’d aimed to, but still… they will be posted.

Here’s the item that was sold. I’m still posting more and more art there as time passes. I expect the total number of available listed items to be around 25 by the end of February:

Likewise, I’m nearly done setting up an overhauled version of TriumphantArtists.com and will switch everything over to the new web design in another day or so. It’s better in terms of navigation, clean style, and flexible [responsive] formatting. The pages, in general, load faster too!

As usual though, don’t expect the changes to necessarily show up in your browser without hitting refresh. My advice, go to the main page at TriumphantArtists.com next week, hit refresh, and, err, feel refreshed I guess by how the site looks after that point? I expect the switch over will be in effect by Feb. 15 and may become visible worldwide over the following 48 hrs. so some cool things should result from that.

“Pirate video” – I’m making a little video short for the nephews’ birthday, putting an hour or so a day into that on top of everything else. It includes some pretty awesome VFX shots. That’s just another reminder of what I can do with videos and visual effects!

sea battle – pirates in pittsburgh suburbs. .GIF loop.

Ships sailing in a pond, during a storm.

Final note – I know everybody’s so, so tired of waiting for something to happen with Miniature Multiverse. I have completed the first part of the game’s design, 100%, with other sections of the game in varying stages of completion. Now I’ve opted to release a ‘partial version’ with the later areas all stripped out temporarily, and post that as a downloadable on Itch.IO with added sections posted every two months afterwards as long as it is still selling (if it sells much at all really, which given the nature of indie game dev, is unclear.) So that is the first fifth of the game which will be posted on Feb. 24th, along with the corresponding sections of the making-of PDF for ‘Extras’ buyers. So yeah, a lot is going on right now. I’m working every waking hour on something creative or earnings related [or both] lately and wouldn’t have things be any other way.

Small update, January 2020

-A new wave of stuff headed to my venue on Etsy, including beautiful artworks like this one, and prices that trend gradually downward until each item sells, even if that means the items don’t break even in some cases. Bonus is that not only is more and more stuff getting posted this month, but there is now a first Etsy review from my first customer on Etsy, a person who took a chance on my shop, and didn’t regret it at all.

Hopefully more sales, and more glowing reviews, will follow.

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

-Lunar New year sale on itch.io will offer all my stock media in a bundle for an unprecedentedly low 89 cents at end of month. 90% off bundle!

I have made 15+ sales on https://matthornb.itch.io so far but nobody has written a review. I am convinced that if even one or two customers do write a review there it would affect the trajectory of the shop in enormously positive ways… encouraging development of even more added quality content at ludicrously low prices.

Note, I have struggled a bit with an unusual deluge of sales on eBay lately and several of those orders have kind of fallen through the cracks a bit. I am sorry about any delays caused by other work, unwanted distractions, unexpected fees/costs, etc. I am working to resolve all remaining pending orders and messes there within the next five days.

I will reiterate that if there are unreasonable delays, I will make it up to any customers affected and will do what I can to resolve complaints – even if that means refunds, or extra apology items delivered beyond what was listed as sold. I am just one guy here so sometimes things do go wrong, I am working on it and I do want to preserve my track record there with (currently) 385 positive ratings and no negatives so far. I would also like to see Etsy and Itch shops develop similarly impressive track records in the long run.

Anyway, the amazing bundle deal on itch.io starts in about a week as does the relaunch of TriumphantArtists.com with a heavily improved and revised design. Please try refreshing the main page starting on Jan. 20 as things will begin to look very different then.

September 2019 updates

So… the things I said I intended to do, in my last post, are happening.

-eBay stock media DVDs, are being sold and some are being auctioned right now along with a lot of other amazing deals intended to draw attention to the store I have there.

https://www.ebay.com/usr/mtthornb

-the two new stock 3d asset packs I promised were in development, are finally available on itch.io.

https://matthornb.itch.io

But – and this is a key thing – I could still really use support to get Miniature Multiverse done soon.

And no, I haven’t yet resumed my efforts on Etsy, but at some point I will. The video ‘Freeway’ is complete, and the new House Trek is in production. I am currently working on a systemic overhaul of nearly all my websites with OpenElement and if some things occasionally seem a bit more defective than usual in next few weeks it is probable they’ll be fixed soon, but as usual you would be well advised to refresh any pages that seem broken or massively out of date. If a page is soon gone entirely, removed, the content is probably just redesigned with a new organizational structure and filename, it is NOT gone. Try refreshing or returning to the domain root, then refreshing. And if that fails, try again a few hours later or a few days later. This should work in 99+% of problem cases. Seriously, it will all be better in many ways (visually, navigationally… in performance and responsiveness terms too) once this transition process is over and the data is all restructured and redesigned.

Right now I am pursuing a lot of work on Amazon’s mTurk and it doesn’t pay well, but it might be enough to cover the remaining miniature supplies and some other costs, by mid October. But again, if you want to help get that moving ahead faster, try buying something from the above shops, or backing me on Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/matthornb (or Ko-fi – https://ko-fi.com/matthornb – if you only want to commit to a small one off payment) or, maybe hiring me via the HornbostelProductions shop. I am not merely offering made to order personalized art in numerous forms, I am now posting an option in which you could pay me to make a virtual tour / virtual world for you or for someone you care about, as a gift item. It is less expensive than you may expect; right now prices amount to roughly $2/ hr, so if you are choosing one of the more costly options it is still only around $28 to order a large, detailed realtime 3d world based on your creative visual ideas, and I can turn it around in a week or so, and give you a playable Windows application at the end of that week. That is pretty cool!

Anyway, thank you all for staying around, I realize things have moved slowly but I am still trying, I have not given up. I think sooner or later something I am trying will work out and my network will take off. patreOnce that happens it’ll be pretty amazing.