May 2020 Major Update!

Hey all you awesome fuzzies and peeps! Got some really great news to share with you heading into May 2020 and wanted to talk about it in a post like this to start the month off!

-[MILESTONE REACHED]-

First, with pledges being over $500 a month I will start working on more videos that have characters interacting with each other such as Max picking up tiny people and messing with them or two macros battling it out and things like that. I will still work on solo animations since I have a nice list of TODO's for those I will be working through over the rest of the year also.

A sincere thank you to all of you supporting my work, it means the world to me and is quite literally changing my life as I spend more time focusing on this than looking for other work. My patreon + commissions have been keeping my head above water in these difficult times and I will never forget that.

-[NEW THUMBNAILS]-

I wanted to create a consistent style for all of the videos I release and creating a base thumbnail design with all the different icons like 4k, NSFW, 1080p, title, etc. needed a place to live on the design and not clutter it to much while also letting the scene it shows off shine through. It took a while to find something I liked but here is a couple examples of them so you can see what I mean. 

Free 1080p Video

4k Paid Video

4k NSFW Video (sometimes there are 1080p variants of this also)

360 Video

-[VIDEO DOWNLOADS]-

A common request from the last couple of months was what I wanted to do about video downloads since I don't directly offer that. I wasn't honestly sure and took some time to think about it and think I have the solution finally!

I already offer a tier to allow people to get copies of the 4k videos and that is working as intended. However for the lower quality 1080p content I release for free some people still wanted downloads links to this so I will be going through all of the posts and adding MEGA links that will serve as alternate source to view the video from their player and also provide a download link to that content!

This seemed like a good way to please those asks and not give away work that others are paying for. Will stick with the idea that paying customers get higher quality content such as 4k videos while free content is limited to 1080p only.

-[UPGRADED TECH]-

I was using a pre-made plugin for VideoJS that was still several versions behind (around 5x) and the current version was around 7x and the age was starting to cause some videos to lag or glitch out for users.

To fix this I created my own plugin for streaming video. It's using videojs as a base and several other plugins and some of my own tinkering to make something completely custom for bigmaxwolf.com 

It also supports VR 360 videos so I will be able to upload those again and the NSFW ones too!! It feels good to have a place to serve them from I can rely on which is a huge win to me and I and I think you all will really like it too!

So early in May you can expect scenes you have seen before and some you have not with VR versions! Since I cannot post these on Twitter or YouTube without the risk of being banned they will remain Patreon exclusive content. The SFW ones will be at the $5 tier and the NSFW ones will be at the $15 tier and above like the others!

-[BIGMAXWOLF.COM LORE]-

For those of you that are new and wondering what happened or if you wondered why I use my own streaming site.. I got a story for you!

When I got banned off Vimeo in April 2020 after releasing Slow Growth video that was a huge blow to me. I had to build up my own encoding and streaming services. Ontop of that I also had to rapidly find an HLS compatible player (VideoJS) to play the videos on all device types and customize it for the site along with integrating it with Patreon and various other tasks.

All that got completed and the end result was me spamming inboxes with all the re-done posts. I had to delete the old ones since they were video posts and I could not edit them without it bugging out. So new posts that use thumbnail and give link to bigmaxwolf.com site where they can be streamed after connecting it with your Patreon so it knows your tier.

Got all that? It's a lot that has happened! But overall this future proofs releasing content. I don't have to worry about the hosting provider pulling out from under my paws in the midst of a massive video release. The negative to this of course is paying for all the hosting costs to stream the videos, but that is why I have them locked behind tiers and Patreon authentication API to make sure only people that have paid to see them can. This is also what Vimeo integration did for me automatically!

-[SELLING SOFTWARE]-

This was a lot of work, and I have seen other creators going through similar problems especially those like myself which create NSFW content a huge question becomes of where to host this content and not have people just take it without paying. It's a delicate balance where you try to offer up one version and a paid version but at the end of the day the problem of where to host that content and how to stream it to your users can seem overwhelming.

Going forward I will be offering to help integrate other animators and creators in the fandom with this same system if you're interested in using it! All the hard work has already been done and I would only charge a onetime flat-fee to use it and have me help install it if you need that! Please get in touch with me if something like this interests you! Please be aware though you would be responsible for your own hosting and encoding costs but I can show you how to set everything up and save you that headache I had to go through.