Mzone and Cooper #3

With the end of the new format chapter, I've been thinking about the future of Bodysuit 23 a lot. As much as the new format is great in some aspects, there's a lot of draw backs. Mostly on my end.

The old format took at most 3 hours to complete from start to finish. Of course, this showed as the quality suffered from it. The new format, however, usually takes me about 8-9 hours a page. While the comic comes out looking way better, the increase in the amount of time it takes to produce has caused to other projects I work on to suffer.

For one, I haven't written any more of MG Dallas since the very begging months ago. I've been slow on another writing project I've been wanting to do in hopes of getting it published the traditional method and maybe earn a small living from it. There's also my other small side job of doing the English adaptations of games and other misc. stuff for my good friend at Xinoro (In case you don't follow me on twitter, here's some recent stuff: https://twitter.com/xinoro/status/738708890909442048 )

Could be I'm just horrible at managing my time, but some of these things are stuff that I really hope can help me with getting out of my awful financial situation. Bodysuit 23, while is a lot of fun at times and I'm really glad people enjoy it, isn't something that I see in the long term growing that much more. You guys on Patreon are super awesome, don't get me wrong. But Bodysuit 23 has the problem of being based on a niche of a niche of a niche fetish. There are only so many people who care for this sort of thing that will want to read it.

Secondly, and a much bigger issue: starting this fall I'm planning on returning to community college to finish a graphic design associates I started years ago but dropped out to pursue getting into A&M (which everyone got to see how that worked out). I have about 8 classes left to take (with one I'm retaking as a refresher/get to know the latest version of software I haven't touched in 6 years), and that's gonna cut in the amount of time I have to do anything at all.

This brings me to what I want to talk about. Cooper and I have talked about doing the visual novel for a while now, with him programming and me writing/art. One thing I've always wanted to try was do a visual novel serial, where every month or so a new episode is out. The ability to reuse certain assets like character art (a base model where I can draw different clothes/hair/etc, on), backgrounds, and music would cut down on the amount of time of having to create new material of characters sitting down talking where I can change a face a pose if need to instead of redrawing the same character sitting on a couch from 5 different angles.

The benefit of this format would mean an entire story could be consumed at once instead of taking 3 months to tell a simple 19 page story with delays at times, resulting in 1 page a week just to tell 8 seconds worth of story. I could focus more on writing expansive fun dialogue instead of slamming my head in my desk whenever I have to color.

So here's the question: Is this concept worth pursuing to attempt at least once? This would mean there wouldn't be any comic updates for a few weeks, but instead development blog updates.

The patreon itself would still be monthly, but the rewards would more than likely stay the way they are, meaning $5 and up tier would get high res art of any new assets made (you could even make your own visual novel using them at that point!) while $10 and up would get the script of the chapter and any additional behind the scenes documents created.

To give a hint at what the chapter would be about so you all aren't completely in the dark, it's pretty much been called the "Bra Fitting" chapter since first coming up with it a while ago.

Now, if you guys allow it, I can start work on it immediately. If you guys prefer the comic, then I'll forgo those plans and just continue making the comic like always, though once Fall hits there's a high chance the number of pages will scale back to 1 a week.

So without further ado, here's a poll to let you guys decide the future on how Kevin's story will be told: http://www.strawpoll.me/10422097