OSP SUMMER SEASONAL UPDATE! (Patreon)

Oh heck, it WARM. Summer’s here, and that means it’s time for another update on what’s new and next for us at OSP!

We’ve had a busy spring, with Red, Cyan and I (and Dominic Noble) heading to New Zealand to attend Hello Future Me’s wedding – an absolute blast of a time, and truly magical to celebrate with them in person. After that, Cyan and Red headed home like sensible people, but my travels continued, hopping to Wales and Malta with my dad. The fruits of my Welsh expedition (the Castles of Wales video) is already up on the channel, and NZ & Malta will find their way into history videos later in the year. A great time had by all, however, boy oh boy that punches a giant hole right through the old workflow, so we’ve been doing our best to be responsibleTM and take care of ourselves while staying on top of our weekly videos. I wrote the majority of this seasonal update while on a plane to Vidcon in late June, but only now was able to finalize and post it – busy year.

Meanwhile, Red enjoyed streaming Breath of the Wild in anticipation of Tears of the Kingdom, and we’re planning a big group Zelda stream for August – one of those 8+ hour charity marathons with tons of guests rotating in and out. More details to come, it should be a fun one! In the meantime, we’ll have a Zelda-themed bonus episode of the Overly Sarcastic Podcast with special guest Razbuten going up on the channel in late July. Stay tuned!

We’ve also been experimenting with some short-form content, namely podcast cold open clips and speedpaint videos, which we think strikes the balance of fun, breezy, not annoying, and not just a worse version of a long-form video. We’ve been refining the format of the podcast cold opens and we think we’ve got a good setup now between the color-coded text and cute chibis to identify the speaker, but we’d love to hear your thoughts.

On the video front, July is a real summer blockbuster, as we’ve got three videos on Mesopotamian myths and history – Red is doing the much requested and long-awaited EPIC OF GILGAMESH, bookended by history videos on the Great Ziggurat of Ur and the Fall of Babylon. Going along with this will be TWO special pin releases, a paired pack of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and a special Taurus constellation-style pin (with glow in the dark stars of course). In August and September we’ll follow up with a few Trope Talks on Unreliable Narrators and Character Development Comas, the folktale of the Boy Who Found Fear, plus a history video inspired by my visit to Malta, as well as a video on the foundations of Rome and, hoping to the Greek-Orthodox God, a Byzantines Re-Summarized.

Outside the realm of videos, we’re planning to launch our new merch shop this summer, with the help of the team at Crowdmade. The back-end logistics are probably only interesting to me, but the short of it is we’ll be running all our merch on a new store-page branded specifically to us. We’ve been having some sizable troubles with Redbubble in the past year, so we’re hoping this move will make for a better store experience at every step, from the website to the quality of the products themselves. We’ll be trimming our catalogue of merch options from the like 150+ we currently have on Redbubble to offer a more curated list of our best designs. A custom website also allows us more flexibility in creating discount codes for patrons, so we’re hoping to be able to offer you all better pricing as a result! More on that to come once we get closer to launch.

Lastly, we’re planning on reworking our highest Patreon tier. The current high-tier reward, the monthly digital art exclusives, haven’t been working as intended – the art was always very cool, but the benefit to patrons didn’t match the effort required to make it happen.

So instead of a poll this season, we’d like to turn it over to you in the comments – if you’re a Trickster Deity patron: what might you want to see from us as a new top-tier reward? And for everyone else: what theoretical reward might entice you to join the highest tier? Let us know your suggestions in the comments below, and we’ll see what we can do!

Thanks as always for reading, and for supporting our work by contributing here on patreon.
Onward to summer!

-Blue