ArcJamie

Today marks exactly one year since the start of our community explosion. A year ago we had 400 average viewers on Twitch and ~13,000 subscribers on YouTube. Today we're in the top 100 on Twitch with 10,000-15,000 viewers on every stream. The YouTube channel is about to hit 2,500,000 subscribers. Our Discord went from ~5,000 to ~205,000 members as well. With all of that support this has absolutely changed my life. Here is everything that has happened since then. We started a Corporation and hired in all of our support staff. Everyone is on full-time salary with medical/dental/vision coverage. I can't do all of this without them so this makes the most sense. People claimed we would go bankrupt within a few months due to this. I gave everyone a raise back in August, thanks to you. We were able to increase the size of our ferret rescue Snails House. This is going to become the largest ferret rescue and sanctuary in the united states this next year. We're working with some awesome groups to build a custom facility for all of this. The goal is to have a capacity for ~250 animals and more full-time staff members to cover it all. The rescue and the employees that maintain it are funded entirely off of Ad Revenue through the streams. You can always catch them here. ferrets.live I moved into a new place. This place has enough land for me to build the ferret rescue building. It's also got fiber internet now so no more drop-outs on stream. Much better digs and much less worry overall. Can't thank you enough for that. We now hold the record for all-time highest Hype Train on Twitch. On April 1st the community banded together to literally break Twitch. Twitch also made a global emote called DidIBreakIt for anyone who was there. We hit level 106 and nobody has broken our record thus-far. Absolute madlads. You voted for me to win the Software and Game Development Streamer Award. This was an incredibly humbling experience for me. I managed to not shit and cry on stage as well. That's a win. We've given $56,805 to charity this year. Any time you put in TTS messages they go into a queue. If I don't answer your message by the end of the stream it goes to charity instead of me. This system lets us support tons of awesome causes around the world. All of the receipts can be found in the debt-tracker channel on our discord. discord.gg/piratesoftware I now own William Osmans skull because of this. Shoutout to CDawg for his charity auctions. We've run two of our largest Game Jams ever. Pirate Jam 14 and 15 saw tens of thousands of competitors. It's incredible to see how many awesome projects have come out of these. Keep being rad and keep making games. itch.io/jam/pirate We released a bunch of updates to our community Minecraft server called Blockgame. This has been a side project for the last two years or so. It's a fun way to test systems design and dork around in a shared space. Blockgame is a Social Sandbox MMO using Minecraft as a game engine. blockgame.info I finally finished the grand majority of writing needed for Animus in Heartbound. This has been a pretty tough one for me as I am not that strong of a writer. All of my experience before this has been writing for DnD Campaigns so this is a huge step up. Happy with where it is now though and can't wait for you to experience it. store.steampowered.com/app/5… I was hired on to be Director of Strategy for @offbrand_games. After seeing so much damage being caused by bad publishers in our space I wanted to fix it. I was either going to sign on with another publisher or start my own and either would be fine. Offbrand has been awesome to work for and I am really happy we've had such an impact. We just released Rivals of Aether II and it's been really well received which feels great. We live in a time where it easier than ever before to self-publish. You definitely don't need a publisher to find success. Go make games. I got a dog. His name is Spaghetti. He acts like Spaghetti. Meatball the cat dislikes him. We've got a lot more planned for this next year. Thanks for such an insane adventure. Not stopping any time soon.

The 15th #PirateJam starts in a little over 5 days. If you're on the fence about joining because you don't think you have the skills... you do. The entire point of a game jam is to learn, grow, and kick more ass on the other side! GO MAKE GAMES!!! itch.io/jam/pirate

Hey you #gamedev. You got this. Keep making whatever project you're working on. It doesn't matter if it's perfect or if everyone will love it. It matters that you made it. You'll make more after this so don't stop yourself before you reach this first of many finish lines.