State of the Union: Walking on the Moon

Hello hello allio! Wow it's been a year already? Holy cats. Oh my thralls.

Well, its been a busy year of Volitioning and projects of varying success as well as progress down the main line of the Thrallworks game. I have thoughts both salient and vague on how these things went and how things should go into the future- but I am rather aware that people do not like their content creators to wax poetic about the content 'coming' and just want to read posts with content in them-- and so please enjoy the new art provided throughout to tick that box off and to roughly frame the talking points. (Full res in attachments

2025 In Review

It was...alright.

Cool. So, 2026?

Well first, we must understand that another financial collapse is imminent and adult content is being strangled across the web.

Maybe we can say the collapse'll happen in 2027 if we're very optimistic, but regardless, things are going to get hairy this year even on top of previous years, and I'd like to do at least a little bit of futureproofing, which involves making changes to my tiers, my products and my projects.

So, to summarize a few of these things:

$1 and $2 Tiers will be hidden come Jan 31st, and a new $3 Tier will be the lowest available tier.

I'm sure you all appreciate most subscriber-pages these days have $3 as a minimum simply because of the expense of things. I wanted to buck the trend when I first set up the patreon, but I honestly can't afford to any more.

However! For those of you on these tiers already and coming onto those tiers over the month, you will basically be rewarded for your early adoption by joining in the delicious $3 post-bounty. It should be noted that upping the pledge to a higher level after the fact will mean you can't reduce back down to $1/$2 amounts which saddens me, but as Percy Derolo III says: Life needs things to live, and sadly I too am still alive, and so require the things a slightly higher price-point can allow me to have without literally starving to death.

I'm making a Thrallworks website.

As I said above, The Powers That Be will not stop tightening their grip over media and adult content until they strangle us down to pockets that they can fully control. A little tin-foil hatted a statement? Perhaps, but I've not seen any evidence to the contrary. Indeed, this was the main issue with my making a discordbot at the start of the year- by the time real progress was made, suddenly all the age verification happened and engagement on the platform tanked. VPN's will work fine until the EU and American bills pass later this coming year-- and they will pass. We run to bluesky from twitter to escape draconian measures and ai, and now bluesky'll be introducing similar methodology and it has worse discoverability anyway. Where do we flee to next? Mastodon? Shall we return to good old fashioned IRC? We run backwards to move forward.

So I figure, why not run all the way back? I actually do own the thrallworks domain name and have for several years now, but have done nothing with it-- just let it burn a hole in my pocket. Seems like now's the time to put it to some use. But for what?

- Link to an itch.io Thrallopedia

- Archive art from many years back neatly arranged

- Commission info and availability that's updated regularly.

I'll likely have to research age-verification options, where to host and all of that business, but overall it's better than art or lore or anything being scattered over several websites or easily lost, and will provide a nice centralized area for people to check out the wares and easily commission me for more. Perhaps the main website is more like an old web-ring link to content, and itself only has 'suggestive' pieces and the more blatant stuff would be elsewhere in some non-searchable site or other transmissable method. We'll workshop it.

As to when this website is going to be made, well not for the first few months at least, we've other high-prio things to do, but we probably need it before mid-autumn at the latest, if it's going to happen.

The Domine Set (when it comes out) will increase in price to $5 to the public, and subscribers get a discount based on tier level. As I retroactively update old Sets, they too will mirror this price.

Again, another case of increasing with inflation-- however, I'm sure what I'll be offering within the Domine Set will be more than worth the price increase as well as some cleaned-up/improved content within other Sets

Removing all works from Gumroad and putting saleable content on itch.io

I'd love to put my products on patreon, but! Patreon as a platform feels unstable for my content and I feel if I put products up here that might ultimately be the thing that drops the banhammer on this stuff. So for things like sets and comic compilations and perhaps even Archive collections, we're plonking those on itch.io for now. Still not fantastic, but better than nowhere.

For now I'll put the Sets up as they are at their varying costs, and those who are entitled to code-discounts I will give a link to a different 'hidden' itch.io page they can put a password into in order to download it.

Those particular logistical adjustments aside, lets talk more about what I'll be focusing on and how that'll be shaping what's going into what tier.

Immediate Concern - Fulfilling Commissions

This is both the Domine Set Commissions AND a number of outstanding Pony Thrall commissions for my prospective ponythrall game. They've been left hanging too long and we need to be able to take on some more commissions to make ends meet.

So we'll be devoting a majority of our time over the start of the year to clearing these up and off. Which I'm sure will lead to a lot of art for you to enjoy! :D

Volition

I'm not sure that much can change with Volition until I move the scene along I can shake-up the shading. I suppose the one thing I can do is stop kidding myself on how long the pages currently take, and so acknowledge that I can do 1 page every 2ish weeks for the time being. So we'll be aiming for 2 pages a month until we swap scenes, and then we'll revisit.

Thrallworks

Early this year, I'll be releasing the Hospital scene on its own for free as a kind of soft relaunch of Thrallworks in the public eye.

Long long ago when I first started working on Thrallworks, whenever I finished a scene to a decent level, I'd release for public consumption for free. I'd hoped when switching to Unity I could do all the work I wanted, add in the old Ren'Py scenes, then release that in a similar manner.

But it turns out that was naive thinking, and struggling with that undoubtedly led to some spiralling inefficiencies and aversions. So instead I'll just go scene-by-scene and try my best to suffer the blows of "Where is the old content? This is less than you gave us years ago and not as good"...which is still potent psychic damage even though it's to be expected.

Anyway, the focus for the time being is on the Thrallpod scene and the animations involving it. Until the commissions are taken care of I will reduce the update posts for TW to once a month, and aim for a playable-enough scene that you can click through to get to the Plaza, then from there balloon the Thrallpod out into full interactability and animation.

Sketches and Illustrations

- I've gotten into the habit of doing some warm-up work for an hour or two at the start of the working day, and over Christmas I've been doing sketch requests by $10 peeps, Hunger Game winners and all the like. Its been nice enough that I want to continue doing it!

So yeah, expect more roughs in the future of various styles and in various settings. Where possible I'd like to make things plausibly canon regarding art in certain settings like Thrallworks, but we'll tackle it as it comes, and take the most promising of these pieces to work on further into a proper illustration.

Odds and Odds -- The other stuff I do.

There were plenty of things I started this year that got a good amount of progress or a good idea that ended up falling off due to...well to be honest mostly due to getting Volition pages out XD

The Gladiator game, the Discord Applegreen bot, Bondsbody things, the Moov island discord game, the Aubertin series...all of these and previous things are all worth continuing or working on but not to the exclusion of the main work. So, I won't sweat the small stuff and just work on them either when there's no requests to work from, or we're ahead in the other work I do.

Redefining what's going to be available for each tier.

Other than a few choice things floating around the $5 tier, I think some of what is on offer- and for what price- is a little nebulous, so I want to be more clear and consistent with both my output and what people at various tiers can expect (outside of polls/bits and bobs that I know I am liable to do)

$3 Tier

• Art Updates -- Art pieces I draw either from Sketch Requests, Discord Game Rewards, Whims, game art I want to make public or whatever.

• 2 Art Updates a Month

• Polls on what Sketches to turn into full Illustrations (or get a sequel/expanded on as I'd see fit)

• $2.50 Discount on Thrallopedia Set Products

• Access to the subscriber-specific boards on my Discord

$5 Tier

• All previous rewards

• 2 Volition Pages a Month

• 1 Thrallworks Reorientation Update a Month

• $3 Discount on Thrallopedia Set Products

$10 Tier

• All previous rewards

• Sketch Requests (Thread refreshed / inciting topic changed each month)

An idea for a bit of art! If it overlaps with something I intend to do anyway in a more serious capacity I'd ask you to come up with a different suggestion. Ideally the art should be feasible in a 2 hour timespan.

A Survey!

Lastly, at the end of each year, I want to do a survey to help me grok what people who support me like and what I should plonk out. So without further ado, here's the 2025 survey!

It's very short, and if you fill it out you're entered into an art raffle to get a Material Index entry! Though if the character you want's not compatible we can workshop something else.

__________________________

Ok, that's the Address :D! Thankyou for your generous time in skimming over the bullet-points; we'll get back to the grindstone and reconvene for the next Union Address around mid-year.

Happy New Year! Here's to a good one.