Friday Rambles 2023-11-17 (Patreon)

Why does time go so fast? I can't believe it's already Friday.

I've been juggling a bunch of different projects lately, and have been making progress on basically none of them, so I finally decided to put on my Project Management hat, and made some Trello boards and "prioritized" my "stuff."

Stuff:

• Whiskey Bar
• Tiger-chan plush campaign
• Localizations for CN and KR
• Steam Autumn Sale
• IndieLive Expo 
• Steam Winter Sale
• Store stickers update
• Next zine issue
• EMGAME2

Not to mention all the non-EM related real-life stuff going on due to the end of the year holidays.

My biggest priority right now is the Tiger-chan plushie launch in umm...

Above: Tiger-chan Plush page is up! Very mysterious.

That's right! 5 days. And 19 hours, and 35 minutes.

If it were live, it would probably look something like this. Maybe. idk. 

Above: Secret behind the scenes knowledge. Dang, look at how cute the thing is.

If you're following me on social media, you might have noticed that I'm beginning to post Tiger-chan comics, which may or may not be related to the plushie campaign starting next week. I'll post them here, too, for posterity:

Part 1:

Part 2:

I have 3 more comics planned, but while making this Patreon post I realized that the campaign is actually launching two days later than I had planned for. Oops. But that means I have more time to draw comics, which is good. More comics.

I am actually very pleased at how fast I've been drawing these. I haven't drawn in like 2 months, but these have been really easy to churn out. I have a script already written for all of them, and my process is like: draw rough thumbnail of entire comic, and then draw rough lines, and then draw actual lines over them. (... very standard stuff). Well, hopefully I can keep up the momentum and keep up the daily posts til the plushie campaign launches.

Above: In the spirit of the olden days, here's a rough for the comic

The timing of the plushie campaign coincides with the Steam Autumn sale, which begins November 21. That means that more people will be interested in buying the thing, after seeing the news post on Steam. Well, that's the hope, anyway. I need to make some marketing art for that too, but I don't really have time... Well, maybe I'll just spam my game page links under my daily comics.

With all these marketing events I have to deal with for the next couple weeks, I haven't really had much time to focus on Whiskey Bar, but I've made some progress there too. I'm mostly doing outline writing and tinkering with mechanics. It really is turning out to be just as long as EMDND, though, which is kind of a problem, because that means I will also have to spend another two months after I'm done + lots of money getting it localized into 3 other languages, which is kinda heavy for a free update. I might have to limit the scope of it before it gets too big, but I would also feel guilty releasing something short and (to me) half-assed.

Above: Whiskey Bar dialogue script, so far. It looks like roughly 1/6 the EMDND script. If it goes as currently planned, it'll be several times this

Of course, I know I'll be releasing the KR and CN localizations before this is done, so maybe by the time Whiskey Bar is done I'll have a big enough potential new player base that doing a free update will be worth it for the visibility. Man I hate thinking of everything in a business sense. I just wanna make fun games with fun stories that are enjoyable to play.

But you gotta eat to live, as they say...

You know, if it truly gets to a point where it actually becomes EMDND size, I might just update the story a bit to be completely standalone, and release it as a new game altogether. Why not? If it truly does stand alone, I might as well. Or maybe make it paid DLC. But it's a little early to be thinking about that.

Above: Pretty cool placeholder CG

After I post this Patreon post, I'm going to go draw part 3 of the Tiger-chan comic series. I need to finish it tonight, because I won't have time to work on it during the weekend.

It's gonna be a busy week. And on top of that, I've got Thanksgiving plans, too. Not a lot of wiggle room to be flexible with my Trello boards... But anyway, thanks for your support, as always! See you next week.