Happy Holidays & Happy New Year!
I thought it would be appropriate to reflect a bit on the past year. It’s hard to believe its already been TWO years since I started posting my AI generated content on deviantArt. It really doesn’t feel that long that I was pondering whether I should post my creations at all. I have to say I wasn’t really expecting much, and most certainly wasn’t expecting to reach almost 25,000 watchers and more than 1.6 million views this year!
Launching commissions
In the beginning of 2024, I opened up to doing character commissions. It turned out being a huge success — so much I had to close it down just to catch up and not let it affect other parts of this little venture.
New opportunities & collaborations on deviantArt
Before summer, one of my contacts at deviantArt reached out to me and asked whether I wanted to join a new initiative they’re starting up. They invited me join their private Discord server, promised closer collaboration and opportunities to be promoted on their website! Of course, I wouldn’t say no to that!
I also started collaborations with other content creators, like EdenAgency and Ai-Kitten (for Rival Queens and Curvy Companions, respectively), which provided me opportunities to work with other creatives with similar interests. In addition, I also started commissioning unique faces (e.g. textual embeddings) for a lot of my new, upcoming characters, mostly to help with my adoptables but also make it easier to create story-related content.
Content Violations & the threat of being banned
Strangely enough, something else happened right before summer that pretty much would kill this little venture of mine: I got hit by several content policy violations on DeviantArt (which I wrote about in this post). Now, this has happened to me before, so didn’t really make me raise an eyebrow. I have gotten hit by content violations in the past, but this was the first someone emailed me about the violations saying I would get banned. Perhaps The difference this time around was that if I didn’t implement changes, they would permanently ban me from posting new content on the platform entirely. That pretty much lead to the creation of this website as response in the event that I would get banned.
Fortunately enough I have a lot of great supporters and fans, as well as the support from other content creators. My contacts at deviantArt also reassured me that I wouldn’t be banned from the platform as long as I complied to what their Customer Support was saying. Apparently, this was to ensure my account was in good standing when they’re ready to do the seller promotion.
More great tools for AI generated content
Lots of things have changed since then, generally all for the better. Sometimes I feel like it’s changing a lot of faster than I can keep up—especially when it comes to new innovations and technologies like the introduction of LoRAs, ControlNet, and now latest, text-to-Video generation using KlingAI and Hailuo AI—which is something I’m starting to look into as a complement to my existing content! You can check out some AI Video content here. But I’m super excited about the potential of doing longer video production based on my characters in the near future, and creating longer and more meaningful video content! More on that in the coming month.
What’s next?
So what is in store for 2025? In near future, I will refocus my efforts on the following areas:
More story-related content
I love working with writers! The goal is to push out 3-4 stories per month. As some of you might not know, I have a huuuuge backlog of stories. It was one of the reasons I retired the monthly updates for adoptables since they turned out to be quite time-consuming when I had more than 25+ characters to do every month — and that was in addition to my daily content and adoptables! Simply didn’t have time when I’m only able to dedicate 2-3 hours a day doing this! I will likely have to cut out other time-consuming efforts as well — more on those later (nothing that will affect daily content though).
World-building efforts
I also want to finish writing some of my world-building content, like Fantastiska, Aldermark, Blue Revere, and Empyrea. Or at least I want to start releasing the content that I have already finished writing and only released to the writers I collaborate with. In the end, I plan to use these world-building efforts for other type of products, like visual novels, adventure games, and table-top roleplaying games. I also plan to release these under Creative Commons licenses to allow others to use and create content for these settings. All this content will be released on the website.
Relaunch the website
I want to finish up the website and let it become a source for all things related to what I have built upon deviantArt. This is not meant to replace my presence on deviantArt, merely complement it and make it easier to immerse yourself in the lore of the worlds these characters exist in.
So this is pretty much what I have planned for the year! Things are of course subject to change, but hoping these efforts will allow me to move closer to make this my primary source of income! I want to thank everyone that has and still are supporting me up to this point — without your support I wouldn’t be in this position, so I’m forever grateful for being given this opportunity.
Happy New Year everyone, and let's hope 2025 is gonna be an awesome year for everyone 😄
