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Tana's trials and tribulations

I realized I never made one of these. hahaha.

Some of you may know me from back in the days of RMXP.net/.org or Spongen.org as Tana. I took a sizable break from sprite making, and have recently gotten back into it.

The Last 10 years:
I lived in Sendai, Japan for a year starting in 2007, teaching English, really would love to go back.
Lost my father to cancer at Christmas of 2008, had my galbladder nearly rupture in 2009. Worked at Best Buy for two years without much arting.
I met my awesome partner, Hunnie, in 2011, a transwoman QA developer with aspirations of game development. She also introduced me to her former co-worker who was a game developer working in Unity. We created a start-up studio, released Ronnie's Airship (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.FatCat.RonniesAirship), and hosted a successful Kickstarter for a game based on Dr. McNinja in 2012, and crashed and burned when Hunnie came down with pneumonia and we ran out of money. She declared bankruptcy in 2013.
Ran an Etsy store selling embroidered patches, didn't make enough money to make up for the amount of time spent making things.
Got a contract working on an English Language learning game with my partner in 2014. The producer/financier for that project went to jail and we stopped getting paid.
February 2015, we had no income, couldn't pay rent, tried to move back in with my mother. That exploded due to a fight with my mother and her son, and we wound up standing out in the rain with nothing but the clothes on our backs and my laptop.
Landed with some of Hunnie's friends for the past year. She's been unemployed the entire year, I've been working for Kan Gao (aka Reives) on the sequel to "To The Moon." I launched another game, Mermaid Dash(https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.JadeChimera.MermaidDash) that I did all of the coding and artwork for, have also developed a new sprite template and launched a Patreon (http://www.patreon.com/alisatana) to support that.

This month, Hunnie may have a job again, but we need to be out of the place we've been staying in by the end of the month. Probably won't get Hunnie's first paycheck in time to be able to pay rent deposit - facing homelessness again.

Super Stress.
 
Reives is a name I haven't heard in a long time!

I'm sorry to hear of your problems. But indie game making is on the rise, rpg maker is more popular than ever, and now seems a great time to get back into game making.

I wish there was a quick fix, but I can't think of one. Releasing a resource back on rmweb could work, in the long term.
 
Hunnie and I are looking to set up a gofundme page to help raise the money for a move-in deposit, because we know that with the new job, we should be able to get stable again very soon, just not before the end of the month, ya know.

I'm probably not going to do any developing in rpg maker, but I'm definitely going to release my new sprite library for XP, and I'll see how much MV pisses me off to make the adjustments. I am excited because Unity is releasing a built-in tilemap editor in June, and I'm hoping to have one or two packs of resources done by that release and sell them on the Unity asset store there, as well as hitting up some of the other asset store sites, like rpgmweb, gamedev market, etc. But, as you point out, that's a long term solution.
Hopefully friends and strangers pitching in $5/$10 here and there will help us raise enough funds.
 

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