Mid-Year Massive Update! (Patreon)

I hope you're not too wiped out from a week of blowing your hands off with firecrackers, boys n' girls, cause it's that time of the year again!  That's right, it's Update Time!  Buckle in, cause we've got a lot to go through!

First and foremost, I want to take a bit of time to make sure you all know how awesome it is that we have the opportunity to make all this kinky, smutty stuff for you guys every month!  This is all possible cause of you, and you rock my friggin' socks off!  Seriously, thank you to everyone who makes my dream of making art full-time possible, I only hope I'm making it as worthwhile for you guys in return!  

Okay, enough gushing, Updates!  Let's get the big one out of the way:

1. I want all the Development Tier Patreon rewards to be exclusively comics by the end of the year.  What I specifically mean by that is, I'd like to phase the Interrogation Room and Pinup Wallpaper into more comic pages over the course of the next six months.

- But Sneak, why would you get rid of Pinups? 

I should stress that I'm not completely getting rid of them.  The last few years of writing and drawing comics has given me a dozen ideas for new stories I'd like to tell (and more smut I'd like to draw), but I don't have the time to devote to more comic series if I'm making 1-2 pinups every month as well.  Something's gotta give, and I think, when push comes to shove, I'd rather be exclusively comics than anything else.  

- But what comics would you be making?  

The comments attached to our final Restricted update made me realize not only just how much you guys liked our comics, but also that you guys wanted to see a lot more than what we already have! Which brings us to our second major point:

2. Starting this month, we will be swapping out the Interrogation Room in favor of doing two Restricted pages per month!  This way, we can have the second six-pages done by the end of September, and maybe a part three finished by Christmas!  

- Wait, wait, wait...Interrogation Room is out!? 

The Interrogation Room has always been part of the older initiative with the Bounty Board and generally making the Patreon Page a sort of “front” for Captor Corps.  We realized over time that the old model was kind of limited in its scope, and if we're going to push forward with multiple ideas over time, we can't really cling on to the past, can we?  Don't worry though, there'll be plenty of Interrogation-style action in the BOUND comic, which was always where it was intended to be anyway!  

- Well, what about the Pinup Wallpapers? 

For the time being, they will remain as the only “single image” piece in the Research Tier rewards.  I actually have a specific idea in mind for them:  Like I said above, there seems to be as many people pushing for more original content as there are pushing for more Restricted content, so – as a sneak preview of our next big original fantasy-themed comic project – Entangled – we're phasing the next four Pinup Wallpapers into some kickass posters of the four main characters you're going to see in that comic!  There isn't, as of yet, any official art of them, and I want to make sure I give you guys some solid impressions of their design before they begin interacting with the world I'm preparing for them!  And don't worry, there will be plenty of kink involved in those pinups as well!  In fact, I spent the last few days finalizing their base designs, which you can see here:

- What about when the Wallpaper gets phased out? What replaces that?

At present, we don't have anything set to replace the Wallpapers.  I've revamped how the funds allocate per milestone reward, and they balance out by replacing the Wallpapers with our new sketch model (see below), but we're going to streamline all future milestone rewards, which brings us to our next point:

3. For the foreseeable future, every milestone reward will be a new comic page added to the monthly turn-out.  This will enable us to work on new projects, or to keep other projects moving forward at even greater speeds, since we'll be belting out more pages-per-month for them!  And, best of all, you guys will be voting on what series' get new pages when a new milestone is reached!   Want to see more BOUND pages? How about more Restricted?  Or would you like to see an entirely new series? The choice will be up to you!  Lastly, but certainly not least...ly, the milestone rewards will be coming every $500 now, instead of every $1000, so you'll see those milestones creep up a lot faster than they used to!

- But you said you weren't done doing Pinups. What then? 

It might be best to wrangle this answer into our next topic point:

4. Single images of the pinup variety will now come courtesy of our new revamped Sketch Series model: The Commission Catalog!

- What's the Commission Catalog? 

We've decided, since Patreon has always taken precedence over our old commission lists in the past, that we're going to merge the Sketch Series with a modern commission format: By adding an extra option to the process – the lineart phase – Patrons of the Development-through-Executive Producer Tiers can now take that extra month to turn their would-be sketches into fully-rendered commissions!  Fully-finished, high-rez commissions will then be added, monthly, to the Commission Catalog, which will, for the time being, be relegated to the Recruit Tier, as a bonus thank-you for being just that little extra level of awesome!

So, you're taking away stuff from the Entry Tier?  

Not at all!  We'll still be throwing sketches - both black-and-white and colored pieces into the Sketch Series zip folder each month, so you'll only really need the Recruit Tier to see the pieces deemed as “Commissions”, which would be the pieces that get lined! You still get the same content, you just get a bit more at the higher level!  I always felt it was weird there was only one reward for Recruit Tier, so this is a small recompense to that!

This is a lot to take in, is there anything else we should know? 

I've been slacking on a lot of projects at the end of each month, pretty much this entire year, and I feel terrible about that.  We have been utilizing a progress model where we do each phase of major updates kinda like we're planning to tackle commissions: sketches, lines, and then colors during the final weeks.  Clearly, this model hasn't been working, and so we're going to change it up this month.  Starting this month (but not exactly this week, since I spent half of it finishing last month's projects) I will be attempting to ensure one Patreon update per week! Whether they be one of the pinups, or some of the comic pages, I will be striving to ensure you guys are getting something from me at least once a week.  I used to do this with the Gag Busts, and everyone seemed happy to get something semi-regularly, so I will be making every effort to ensure something similar happens again!  

So, when can we expect all these changes? 

This very month!  In fact, you can re-submit your sketches to me right now, if you'd like to change to a lineart option!  I'll be PMing everyone already receiving sketches personally to make sure everyone's aware of this update!

As for the other changes, Entangled still has a ways to go, being locked behind the next milestone, but not to worry!  I think, once we've got some commissions from the catalog out in the open (which they will be, at a much lower rez, and possibly cropped, time will tell), we'll be able to pull in more traffic, which will - in turn - get more comic projects unlocked!

So, yes, it's a lot to take in, and I hope this news is mostly good news for everyone!  We'll be offline again this weekend while we take care of more home-ownership problems, but I look to see all of you again on Monday!  Till then, cheers, and as always, stay devious!  

--SA