Upcoming Shift in Projects

Riding on the back of the successful Iron Pen and hoping that the next one in June is in the future I've been thinking about what Smilodon Studio would be doing during the time between the three Iron Pens.  Currently it's been a little bit of everything; trying out YouTube, doing stuff on Twitch, making comic scripts, figuring out IF/VN games, and the like.  Time is best spent when a plan is formed, and the plan was to reach out to a few artists and see about getting a few comics commissioned and start to grow my library of ones I've written...

...at least that was the plan.

With printing prices skyrocketing and a few other problems the more that I've worked through both at home and the recent sales con it appears that branching into comics is not going to be a great option.  While Void Protocol will still be worked on that will probably have to be it and any work on that will likely be scaled back greatly.  This also affects the card/board games that I was thinking of making as well since cards and boards have increased just like comics did.  So with comics and physical games no longer really being where I want to sink most of my free work time into I looked at my options and finally decided where it would best be spent.

So pending the success of the Iron Pen in June we're going to have Smilodon Studio/Black Phoenix Productions shift hard into the realm of interactive fiction and visual novels!  I've pretty much gotten Ren'Py down to where I'm confident about it and working with Fall of the Behemoth I am getting the hang of creating more linear games but with puzzle elements and such.  As mentioned above this means pulling back from comic and board game creation, and also will not be investing time in YouTube either save for Shadowrun/D&D episodes.  Twitch is also going to shift to more writing-related streams for the games and any short stories with games sprinkled in for good measure.

So far the breakdown of time is:

Writing:  40%

IF/VN games:  35%

Twitch/YouTube utilization:  10%

Website work: 10%

Merchandising:  5%

This is still an on-going process and we're not going to make any big switching around until after we make sure that the Iron Pen in June is easily obtainable, so not going into specifics of what's going to happen yet, but thought that as patreons you can see where we're going!

TL;DR  Smilodon Studio is going away from comics and physical games and investing in visual novels and interactive fiction instead.