A little late, but happy new year, everyone!
2020 hasn’t exactly gone as well as I would have liked. Well, that’s the general sentiment all around, but I’m specifically referring to how things have gone with CyberScherzo Studios as a game dev group and how we’ve stalled out on releasing content. Rather than pick a scapegoat or try to find excuses, I’ll say it’s become evident that I really need to step up my game in the areas of project management and producing. I want to do better in 2021. I need to do better in 2021. To start with I’m currently taking some online classes and reading through some books to learn some proper project management skills. (also some writing and game dev books, because why not?)
The big change I want to make this year is to put out content much more regularly. However, I don’t want to start crunching and put pressure on my team to finish our current projects ASAP. Instead, I’m going to double down on even more unfinished projects begin introducing what I’m currently referring to “mini-episodes” of the Little Black Bestiary. Amaryllis and Noire’s episodes got feature creeped a bit and have much longer scripts and bigger plans than our first couple episodes and they’re just taking way longer for a bunch of part-timers to make than I’d planned. (hence needing that project management class). I’m going to keep the ball rolling on those, but since the script is done on Noire’s episode, I had the writers whom were working on that spend January making scripts for really short (ie: 1-2 scenes long, less than 10k words) mini-Vns using some of the characters that haven’t gotten ‘screen time’ yet. I have first drafts for two of them, with two more being worked on. I’m planning to bring in a new artist or two to work on making CGs for those minis and hopefully establish a workflow where we can release them regularly while still keeping the ball rolling on the bigger, more ambitious games.
Also, when I started The Little Black Bestiary as a project, I was a little worried about having way more characters than I could actually use for anything and that the time and that resources spent on designing new characters and making profiles could be better spend towards making ‘full’ games, but the mini episode plan takes that fear away a bit. So expect us to be putting out more character profiles as well and expanding the website. I figure it wouldn’t altogether be a bad thing to take a similar approach to the Monstergirl Encyclopedia and introduce a lot of character profiles, and then start making more elaborate content using the characters that become the most popular.
Besides that, I should hopefully have a trailer and steam page for “A midsummer night’s barcrawl” (Amaryllis’s episode) up by the end of February.