Celebrating 5 Years BirdieMaps
Hey everyone!
I can’t believe BirdieMaps has existed for more than 5 years now. In that time, so many things happened. As time flies by, it can be easy to forget where I started and how far I’ve come.
Originally, BirdieMaps was meant to share my maps with all of you and earn a little money as a side hustle. Soon it grew from a few dollars to a couple of hundred. When I finished my Master thesis, I had to make a decision that would change my life:
Focusing on the career, or focusing on the thing I love.
Back then, it was a tough decision, yet I’ve never regretted it. All the support and positive feedback I received from all of you helped me go in this direction. Whenever I am depressed or afraid of the future, I see your messages, the love you share, your little stories. And that reminds me, that there is much more purpose behind my decision:
I can bring joy to your table. I can help you escape from the harsh reality in a play of make-believe. And this joy sparks motivation.
Compared to back then, my income is much more stable now, and I can survive well enough to feed my cat Ciri, pay taxes and rent, and even have enough left to feed myself. That’s all I ever wanted.
Thank you all for making this possible!
To celebrate the 5th year of BirdieMaps, all tiers can be joined for free with a 7-day trial. During that time, you can download all maps, modules, update posts, and even surveys and once downloaded, you have them.
Just don’t forget to cancel if you can’t afford to pay for the tier. :)What can be expected in the future? Where will BirdieMaps go in the long run?
With the integration of sounds, teleporter and simple scripts in my FoundryVTT Modules i am reaching a limit of additions i can provide to the modules. The Idea was always to offer the library that helps you prepping your session, not offering a complete lore to the map. I could implement moving elements, like patrols of tiles or more animations, but i consider these less helpful and performance heavy. Next up will be levels Integration for all Scenes ! I still wait until i have finished this season of my own campaigns before updating to Foundry V14. Then i can take a closer look at how the levels system works. After that it's just a matter of time until i get all Scenes done with levels.
I am very happy with the FoundryEssentials Module. It offers exactly the options to customize the maps to your needs. I plan to expand the existing libraries with more content.
Next huge project will be "The Evil Guide: Cults" Kickstarter. This Book Trio is made for anyone who wants to embrace the evil side of campaigns. It offers Guidelines, prepping tools, cheatsheets and massive amount of content and a whole campaign. Everything you and your players need to feel like evil overlords.
We made huge progress: currently counting 100 new creatures, 55 new spells, 50 new items, 30 powerful rituals, dozens of new rules expansions and much much more covering more than 300 pages of plain text. We want to make this Kickstarter BIG and RIGHT no matter the cost and time it takes. We test everything, rebalance, throw away ideas and develop new things to improve the quality of our content. But the reality showed us that if you want to go big you need to invest.. a lot... And we did. But sadly thats still not enough. Even with good amounts of savings we are not close to get this heartproject project funded in a way we imagine. We are against the use of generative AI which means all Arts and Designs are handcrafted and done by Human Artists. To get the necessary fundings we aim for minor kickstarter project before. In which we demonstrate the usage of The Evil Guide, in form of small evil Adventures.
What else to Improve?
A huge issue i see is the accessability. 50 unique Maps are easy to grasp. 200 are hard to remember but 1000 is impossible to know. The current thumbnails in FoundryVTT are not useful, same with scrolling patreon to just find a single map. Moulinette is a nightmare to set up and always comes with problems, specifically sounds and scripts not imagining levels... I think it is possible to offer a good working library that can be easily accessed in foundry without a horrible upload system. Luckily i have tracked tagged all my maps internally for a long time now so all this data can be used to build an online library. This will be a huge financial investment. Server mangement is something i definetly need to source out. But thats something for the end of the year.
And lastly BirdieMaps will get its own website. I am very late with this but its time for this Bird to build its own nest. I already set up a domain and need to find the time to build a website.
Thank you for your support and dont forget to grab the free content. :)
Comments (24)
Congratulations on all of your success, I have following you for quite a while, and I have been grabbing things here and there when I need them. I'm happy to have supported you financially over the years, and if there is anything else more that I can do, I would be happy to help out. I am at a time in my life where I have a bit of time to spare and looking for more projects to pick up, please let me know if you need some assistance.
Hello, This is my introduction to you, and I am impressed. Thank you for your generous offer. You definitely just gained a new member. I am having trouble getting the free maps. I joined the free trial, but everything I look at keeps telling me I need to become a member. I'm assuming it's user error, so I hope you can tell me what I did wrong. Thanks
Congratulations amazing work
Hi! I'm having an issue while trying to download the packs. I'm using the forge hosting service, which has limited data, I'm getting an error everytime I try to download the maps that the data quota has been exceeded, yet I haven't even used half of my data so sayeth the website, so my working theory is that this pack is huge, do you know the approximate size of the master collection? I understand that 1k maps is alot of maps, but i've exhausted other options and feel like it may genuinely be an issue with forge, and not your collection. If you could provide an approximate size it'd give me something to go to forge with and ask why my data isnt displaying correctly PS; Congratulations on 5 years, sorry for the headache
Hey, so all modules together are roughly 34 GB. The master compendium does not contain the map images, individual installation is still required. Thats usually within common limits. I assume there is a upload size limit for files. I have this trouble with moulinette, there it is 10 mb per file, and some maps exceeds that. Found this while looking it up, it describes your issue: https://forums.forge-vtt.com/t/foundry-v14-blood-lords-data-quota-exceeded-during-module-download-resulting-in-basis-pack-unable-to-be-downloaded/192259
I cant find the library to download. I can find lots of small one but isnt there a big one?
So generous! I joined the (free trial) Hero tier as I mainly use printed maps. But I'm not finding versions of the maps that are high enough in resolution to be printed in this tier? Is this correct? Should I have gone for the highest tier? 😅
You must be the first person printing the maps. :D All Tiers offer the same resolution in 140 ppi. Which resolution do would you need for printing?
Where do i download?
You can use this post for navigation: https://www.patreon.com/posts/where-to-find-96887155
I guess this free pas has ended? Well. That`s unfortunate. Still as a fellow map creator (Mainly for myself and my party) i do enjoy your works, and I`m greatly inspired
No? the free trial is still going for the whole may. Did you had any issue with the free trial feature? Once joined it lasts for 7 days, thats the patreon feature. If you had difficulties, send me pm and I'll give you a free membership :).
hello i joined for the 7day trial and chose folk hero, i did not know that you need dungeon master tier for foundry vtt compendium module. i cancelled already the folk hero trial, thinking i can join again for dungeon master tier, but i cant redeem now. is there any other way i can try to get the module for foundry? thank you and congrats on five years
Check your pm :)
is there amaster download link? or google drive to view the maps in and download themfrom there?
Sorry there is no master download link, you have to manually download the packs from the master post, for just browsing the maps the patreon shop or the image gallery of the master post is perfect. The issue is not the convinience but the security. Such a master downloadlink would include all the Maps with upcoming maps, which also means that anyone with that link can always download the maps no matter if subscribed or not. I had this once and found that link mutliple times published across the internet. I had to restructure all posts and my drive to solve it. Sorry the inconvenience here. :/
The trial was supposed to be free for 7 days, but I still got charged. But it doesn't matter, those 1,000 maps are definitely worth more 😄
Holy crap, huge congratulations on your 5th year milestone! I've seen your work on r/battlemaps and the quality of your maps is always outstanding. Although my session is currently on hold, I will for sure be using this library in the future. Doing a free week trial is a genius move, you get a lot of exposure this way - and I will be staying a paid member for a few months of course. You absolutely deserve everything good coming your way! Thank you so much <3
How to redeem free trial? Everywhere I looked it told me to pay :(
Usually you should be able to join the specific tier on a 7 days trial. You probably need to set up payment information as the free trial continues automatically (you can cancel directly after you joined). you will still have access to all posts for a whole week. And if it happens that you forgot to cancel in time or somehow managed to join not for free, just hit the refund button and i'll grant it. :)
Greetings! I happened to find your Patreon page last week, and you generously offering free versions of your excellent maps to everyone (and which I had downloaded) already had me considering becoming a paid member. Even more generously offering a week for everyone to freely download complete versions of all of those maps, including being ready to use on Foundry VTT, has certainly convinced me to support you with some money. I hope to be able to use some of the maps in games that I run for people in the future. Many thanks, congratulations on five years of making maps, and good luck on your future endeavours! :)
Thanks a lot :)
Congrats on the milestone! 5 years is a genuinely long time for a Patreon page to continue, and successfully I should add on top! Long time free follower, can't seem to work out the 7 day trial for free upgrade tough
Thank you :)