Vote on the webcomic (Patreon)
Content
We already discussed this matter with some of you over on Deathblight Discord.
But we figured we should ask all of our Patrons from the 5 $ tier upwards, via this vote, how they feel on the matter.
Please feel free to comment below or to discuss things with us over on Deathblight Discord.
The vote will be running for 7 days.
We didn't decide on anything yet, we mainly want to hear your opinion before we make a decision.
Some of you may ask, why do we hold this vote?
The answer to this question is:
With the recent team expansion and Steam opening up to adult games, we really want to push forwards. The webcomic so far takes up 8-9 days out of 21 workdays of Crescentia per month.
This is almost half of Cres' worktime.
The main reason the webcomic is eating up so much time is because every page has to be drawn from scratch. There are no graphics to be re-used, which is higly inefficient.
In a visual novel the character portraits would be drawn once and used for all conversations.
CGs would be used to illustrate important scenes, action scenes, or to depict hentai scenes.
But the overall graphical workload would be much reduced.
This naturally means that a Visual Novel/ Kinetic Novel will not depict a hentai scene from 5 different angles.
The webcomic does this as every page is drawn from scratch, but it's precisely what takes up a huge amount of time that could be spend elsewhere.
Assuming we would stop the webcomic after the current chapter is done, and we would continue the Deathblight story as Visual Novel instead, what would be the benefits?
We would be able to considerably increase the working speed on all our projects.
Here is the current breakdown of Cres monthly schedule:
8-9 days per month: Webcomic
2 days per month: Patreon speedpaints
3-4 days per month: Deathblight RPG graphics
3-4 days per month: Side Project
3 days per month: Commissions
If we would "free up" those 8-9 workdays that are currently invested in the webcomic, we could distribute them to other sources.
Since we only invest as much of our time into Deathblight RPG as Patreon supporters pays us to, this will only have a minor impact on DB RPG itself.
(resulting in perhaps 1 or 2 additional workdays for DB RPG)
But our side projects will greatly benefit from this change.
Currently we are working on a proper remake of our old game LDH (Last Demon Hunter).
The game will be in full quality with cel-shading CGs and multiple upgrades to the old game.
(new content, new enemies, overall more of everything)
The project is 100% self funded with our private savings, but don't worry, according to the rewards listed on our Patreon, we will hand it out to 10 $ Patrons upwards once it's done.
Currently Cres can only dedicate about 4 days per month to this project.
But if we stop work on the webcomic and continue it as Visual Novel instead, Cres could work roughly 11-12 days on the side project and effectively finish it in 1/3 of the time frame.
(we are talking about 2-3 months versus 6-9 months, which is a huge difference)
After this side project is done, we could potentially get to working on the Deathblight Visual Novel, which could be finished in a timely manner as well.
Potentially this could lead to the LDH remake and a Deathblight VN both being completed and shipped out in 2019.
(no promises though! delays always happen when you least expect them)
Works on Deathblight RPG continue as usual and are not delayed by this.
Frankly spoken, if we continue the webcomic as it currently is, we will be needing at least 6+ years to tell the story that is already planned.
Also it will slow down all our projects as dedicating 8-9 workdays per month to the webcomic alone is a lot.
If we did a Visual Novel instead, we could tell the story that is already planned in less than 5 years, we could include much more lore and dialogues in the Visual Novel and flesh it all out properly.
As well as getting a couple side projects done while we are at it.
(at any rate, we would get much more done in the same time frame or less)
These are the rough numbers on the matter.
Personally, I haven't decided on what to do yet, and I wanted everyones input on this matter as it's a rather big change to our schedules and works we did the past 4+ years.
I don't want to jump to conclusions and rather hear everyone out before deciding on something.
The webcomic is good for having something people can return to twice a week.
And it tells the story of our characters in a lively way.
However, I sometimes feel like it's fairly inefficient and we could make much more progress on the story of the webcomic, as well as our other projects, if we simply turned the webcomic into a proper high quality Visual Novel.
Other than that, with speeding up our side projects we can produce so much more content for you guys, as well as selling those side projects on Steam etc. which will benefit our team in the long run.
Please let me know what you all think!
I really want to hear your opinion on this before I make a decision.
Thank you very much and stay awesome! ^^