2020 Yearly Recap, Future Plans

mirror of this patreon post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/45774016

Hey, Bea here! We've just closed out of our second year this patreon's existence, and there is a lot to discuss.

2020.

I'll be frank for a minute: 2020 was not a very productive year for anyone. The world was on fire, and the United States burned particularly hot. The pandemic, the associated economic crash, (completely justified) civil unrest, and ascendant fascism took a psychological and practical toll on almost everyone. On a personal level, Phoe and I braved a difficult move, coped with the aftermath of a car crash, then later chronic illness and a job loss. Interpersonal dysfunction, a failed artistic partnership, and now a serious threat to our housing security have plagued that last third of the year.

I won't say much else here, but I'm willing to discuss the gory details on the Patron Discord if anyone wants to know.

Suffice to say, it was difficult to maintain any semblance of productivity. Though, we certainly tried.

Yet somehow, this patreon still managed to double in size over this period. I thank everyone who's still a patron after all this, for both their patience and their faith in this project~! Y'all are the literal best.

Dragon Dares

So through all that, what got done? Through joint production with our previous lead artist, we managed to get a few pinups, a small visual novel, and a (still partially complete) game out. Having written it out, all things considered we didn't actually do terrible. Aria Di Bravura was sort of a scope test for the sorts of things we could do with the visual novel formula. In that respect it was fairly successful. Although, we ended up needing way more assets for it than expected. Between Choo's art and Phoe's writing, we ended up with a cute little story that tested the waters for more major forays into that kind of format.

Meanwhile Dragon Dares: Strip Poker is both a successful release and the result of troubled, rushed production. Some of these factors were beyond my control, namely losing our (at the time) lead artist midway through development.

Since we had scoped the project for a team with a dedicated artist, that sort of put us in a tough situation. In addition, there was a game jam coming up that I was dead-set in participating in. I ended up crunching, cutting corners and ultimately releasing a version with only the core gameplay loop to make that deadline. This was a huge mistake, and I take full responsibility for it. Our next release will be a content patch that completes the game, and rounds out some of its roughest edges.

As for the game jam project? Now shelved for the moment, Dragon Dares: One Night Stand was our project for the Knot Safe Fur Work jam. It is small interactive sex game, starring Phineas. It tells the story of a fateful one night stand with a beautiful maned wolf boy name Jaquan. Despite having worked very hard to participate in the jam, the actual project went poorly. I focused my programming efforts in the wrong places, and One Night Stand spent the whole month spinning its wheels in the mud. The rest of the team did good work, and I hope we'll get the chance to actually show it off sometime.

A Change in Staffing

With that out of the way, I should address our recent change in team composition, and what it means for the project.

Since it's kind of difficult to keep the proverbial cat in the bag from mewling loudly, I'll just let it stick its head out.

We aren't on good terms with our former lead artist/musician, Choo. We have no plans to work with her again, nor would she ever be interested in working with us again.

It's a shame, because it means that a lot of her work will simply go to waste, and it means we will need to rebuild the card game from scratch. That's the long and short of it. Hit me up on the discord server if you're a patron and want to know more, but I will not be saying anything else about this publicly.

That said, over the course of the last few months, we've picked up R.T. as our lead musician, and Scironex as a designer. The work we've done together so far has been EXTREMELY good, and I'm excited to show more of it off~

Check out our Meet The Devs post to learn more about them!

The Future

On a global and national level, I do not expect 2021 to be better than 2020 was. But that doesn't mean we can't handle it better, or that we don't have anything exciting plans for the year~!

The first order of business is getting a complete version of Strip Poker out, then try to release a prototype or two by the end of the year. I'd like to say we'll be able to start production on the full game in 2021, but I know that's probably not realistic.

Due to the likely destabilization of Phoe and I's housing situation this spring, I need to find a way to quickly double or triple my income.

That means barring a sudden massive boost of funding, I'm going to need to spend a lot more hours working on things that aren't related to Dragon Dares. Seeing as there's nobody remaining that could work on the project on a full-time basis, Dragon Dares will have to be a nights and weekends project for now.

That said, we have a LOT of extras planned to make up for it! I'm going to do my best to make sure that there are new sketches going up here semi-regularly!

We also have plans to show off things like character profiles and world concepts, as well as miscellaneous Rabbit Rock goodies! I can't make concrete promises, but I'm going to try to upload pinups at least once every month or two as well! There are a few other things in the oven, but they're VERY experimental. I'll be post about those when I feel like the time is right~

In the meantime, thanks for being a patron, and here's a better 2021~!