CyberScherzo

April Progress Report

Added 2021-04-19 00:41:41 +0000 UTC

First off, some spring cleaning.

I think I should double down on my stance that this Patreon is primarily a tip jar for our free releases rather than a vehicle for to actually "sell" anything, and just officially remove the tier rewards for now; at least until I get a smoother workflow established and a solid plan for actually giving tier appropriate rewards regularly. Patrons in general will still get the early access previews and demos of course. And I'll still leave the tiers levels as they are until the rewards are reworked, I'm just considering de-listing the rewards themselves until I deliver more consistently. (which should hopefully be soon anyway)

To get something off my chest, and sorry to go full millennial angst personal blog for a moment, but I am deeply unhappy with my current living situation and my wage slave tier job. The main thing keeping me going and giving me 'purpose' is working on these games, so it pains me that I've managed to put out little to no content over the past year. Time to fix that!

So let me show you what we've been cooking up over the past few months and lay out the plans for the rest of the year!

1. Margarita micro-episode

I've mentioned before I'd like to experiment with a new approach.

Due to some admittingly poor planing on my part, The Little Black Bestiary is in a weird place where it's taking too long to make a single episode to release them regularly, and it's not long *enough* to be doing incremental monthly updates like a lot of other games do.

So, if I wanted to be able to put out a new LBB episode every single month, I would need to make them very quickly with low scope and resources, so I'm trying out a design that would potentially allow me to do that. I'm currently adapting this short story by Sandcastles into a short... hmm... 'visual novel' and even 'kinetic novel' are a bit generous for what this is. It's a digital picture book. I'm gunning to release it on May 5th on Newgrounds, but I'm commissioning some new artwork for it so it mostly depends on if I get those pieces back in time for it.

If the format is well received I'll try doing the same for the Momo short story; and then I'll figure out how many actual bells and whistles I can put into any future ones while keeping the time/budget needed low enough to release new ones every couple months. (and if not I'll try yet another new approach!)

2. Carthaginia mini-episode.

Suprise!

Carthaginia is getting some brand new content within the next couple months.

I dumped my entire Cornavorus stimulus check into making this, so that means it's officially sponsored by the US government!

Her eventual planned "full" episode is kind of ambitious. (It's one of the longer and more complicated plans for LBB games, actually) So this is again, aiming to narrow it down to the smallest scope possible in the interest of actually releasing something. It's literally just about chilling on the couch with her for an afternoon and watching TV, but it's got some really fun dialogue that was a blast to work on. (yes there's sex scenes too) I plan for this game to be the debut of The Little Black Bestiary on Steam, and I'm aiming to release it by the end of May or the first half of June. This one will be more of a proper VN with dialogue choices, just a bite sized one.

I am on the fence if this is going to be another free release or a paid one (for $2-3 dollars... I'd kinda like to get my $1600 back) though either way all Patrons will get it first and without needing to pay extra for it. Either way if it does well I might lengthen it with some additional scenes after release.

3. Amaryllis's episode

This thing has dragged in development hell for too long, and I'd really like to finally release it this summer. I'll hire new artists/writers to help speed it along and finish things if need be. But I did spend a good chunk of the last couple of months getting things polished up well enough to make a trailer for it! (Was mostly trying to replace placeholder art so I could actually show more parts/features of the game)

Here's the trailer, just finished editing it yesterday!

Download - MEGA

I used MEGA as the host so while the trailer is downloadable, please don't share it around yet. I want to get the steam page up and ready for wish-listing so I can link to it from the trailer when I post this with a public announcement. I doubt that embed code will work but figured I may as well try. Can't use youtube or Vimeo for the trailer because it's got a sex scene in it, I'll do a SFW edit before the public announcement though.

4. Something else entirely

This is Peruna:

They're not twins, that's just two different color schemes. She is going to be the protagonist in a little shooter game I'm hoping to make and release a demo for in the coming months. The colors are because we can't make up our minds on which one, though both might be usable for either Mario/Megaman like powerup/weapon indications or for a potential 2-player mode without making a whole 2nd character. It's still in the planning stages so that's all I have to say about that at the moment.

5. Noire's episode progress report

Noire's episode is also hopefully coming out by the end of the year but I have little to show or report for it as of yet. The script is written, the 3d exploration and follower system is coded up. A small amount of 2d art has been made for it, but the artists I hired have been bogged down a bit lately. (Might hire an additional one or replacements if it's not sorted out by the summer) There's still a bunch of minigames to be made for it as well, and I really want to take the time to polish this one up nicely. I'll resume focus on it in June after releasing the mini-episodes so I won't have much more to report until then.

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On the note from my moment of angst earlier while I'd love to abandon my crappy day job and dive into game dev full time, I need to acknowledge that it's either not realistic or at least a long-term goal. So I'm going to set a more realistic goal for these projects: I'm going to aim for building up some momentum and trying to achieve revenues of approximately $1000 a month (Between Patreon/Steam/Itch.io/Etc.) That wouldn't even cover my rent if I were keeping the money personally (hence full time being a far off goal) but that's enough to keep The Little Black Bestiary afloat with ongoing, regular, frequent content releases with the scope of the micro/mini episodes discussed above without needing to dip into my own pockets. After achieving that goal, at that point I'll start charting out a path to building a professional studio out of it and our other game projects. In the meantime, I need to start hunting hard for a better job, maybe with some of those 'benefit' things I keep hearing so much about; something with a better schedule AND better pay would give me both more time to work on and a higher budget for the game projects too.

Thanks again for all the support you've shown us so far.