End of Year report 2020

Well here it is, last day of 2020 (though for some it's already the new year) and its time to look back on what we did for this year and looking forward to the next.  There have been quite a few achievements for this year so we'll just go over the big ones.

-  The old backlog has been finished.  There was quite a bit of writing that was done for this year and one major accomplishment of that is that a couple of older stories that had been on the trello for a while have been completely finished.  The result is nearly a dozen books that can be edited and get covers for later on in the year.  As of right now there's about 200k left in the queue of newer work but I'm confident that I can get that done in January after bulking down.

- Huge strides towards Rain and Shine have been made since the start of the year.  The biggest addition are the sprites that have been added and make it look like a real game.  Soon we're going to hopefully have a few backgrounds in there as well and really make it shine, but for now the path has been set for finishing the game possibly even by the end of 2021.  We also attempted to do a few smaller interactives but still learning  on how to do one within a month, after a rocky start we're hopefully going to keep going with them, though with Rain and Shine back to receive monthly updates it may happen less.

- Smilodon Studio has moved to new quarters and gotten new furniture and equipment!  Even though we weren't able to move to a new den we got as close to one as possible which has given me more space for projects that will hopefully be revealed sometime in 2021.  With most of our upgrades complete I'm looking forward to creating more in the new official space for Smilodon Studio in the year to come.

- Debt reduction for 2021.  Even with the upgrades and such the lack of conventions and other such things has led to an overall reduction of debt in Smilodon Studio.  It's thanks to this patreon and my commissioners that have allowed me to hopefully open up for new possible things instead of working to continue to pay off the debt incurred to get Smilodon Studio off the ground.  If this year is similar in nature then hopefully we could make this company completely debt free, or reinvest in finishing up Rain and Shine.

Now that we have 2020 taken care of, let's see what we got planned for 2021.

- Less commissions.  Right now commissions have been about %70 of my workload, and for 2021 I would like to move it back to about a third of that, which is mainly the people who support this patreon and maybe a few others here and there.  That means no more big openings, instead I might have one or two smaller ones in the month for one to two 5k slots.  This is still up in the air but I would like to diversify what I'm doing instead of just doing the writing thing.

- Updated Twitch content.  My twitch account has been long overdue for an upgrade and unfortunately my plans to do so in early 2020 failed when the person I commissioned to do so flaked out on me.  This time I went with a far more professional route and manged to get quite a few new things, so when it comes time to reboot the channel after February there should be an entirely new look to it.  Along with that I'm planning on doing more stuff with an actual camera; I have bought a green screen and a petsuit to prepare for it and though I do have a mask as well I'll probably be looking for something a little more custom in the future.  While I have no plans to make a partner push in the near future I do want to focus more on making premium content for twitch.

- More YouTube content.  YouTube is something that I've been dabbling in, most recently uploading Shadowrun content in order to pretty much archive it.  I have a number of other ideas for short bits, informational videos, movie/game content, and the like that I've been meaning to do for a while.  With the scale back on writing and the updated studio I feel like now is the time to start doing things like this.  I also would like to lose some weight when this happens, but that's more of a personal goal then anything business related.

- Rain and Shine and other Ren'Py projects.  So the biggest move in 2021 will be either one of two things; either the push to finish the programming/writing of Rain and Shine or the development of a new project concurrent to this one.  While I enjoy writing R&S I've been working on this game for a total of two years now mainly as a means to learn how to use Ren'Py, and now that I've gotten a firm grasp on it I would like to bring something new in that's a bit smaller in scale to the project that I have going.  Right now I'm basically a one-man show minus the art I commission so I would like to try and get something out there that might help push things so that Smilodon Studio could bring on someone like a full-time artist so that I can get things out faster without relying on commissioning people.

- More personal writing.  I definitely want to keep up the writing even if there's less of it, and with less commissions I feel like I can finally write a few book ideas I've had on the backburner for a while now.  Sometimes you see the ideas for the smaller ones on the patreon exclusive polls, but I also have a few novels too I would like to have written.  We'll see if I can get this going with everything else that's being planned for the new year.

Well that's about it, I know that it's quite the wall of text but to be fair it's been quite the year as well.  I know things have been rough for a lot of people so for one of the last sentiments of the new year I would like to thank everyone here for coming in and supporting me even during the rough time that I'm sure many had.  It's thanks to you all that I'm able to even make these sort of plans for new content to share here and other sites, and I'm looking forward to another year of creating fun things!

Happy New Year everyone, hope we all have a wonderful 2021!