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As Leopard's Lair grows, we realize several things about the original design that don't work.

One of the hardest things to communicate well is value. The second one is the Rosette system, which we figured might be a bit too cumbersome for newcomers.

One of our solutions is to come up with more traditional tiers that offer set rewards rather than tokens that allow you to redeem any reward you want. You lose flexibility, but you end up with an easier and more straightforward system. There's great appeal in simplicity as well.

The problem with such approach is the upfront cost. Our original plan for the Rosettes was to have a 3-panel comic strip with colors at about $70, which seems on par with other comic creators around the same skill level as we are.

They're from countries where dollar conversion brings a value increase for them, making the deal more appealing to them than to us, as we can only match such prices with a personal loss.

But who would (or could) pay $70 every month for a comic strip? The Rosettes were created as a solution to that problem. You don't get a reward every month (usually), but you can slowly work towards one if you can't fork out large values all at once. It does require some planning and thinking, and we realize that might not be a need many would have for starters. I love the idea of flexibility, but how many out there would really benefit from that, I wonder!

With that in mind, the "static" tiers will offer art with a little less quality, but the cost is greatly reduced. Our goal is around $50 for a colored, 3-panel strip.

This is our first attempt at coming up with this faster workflow. The main difference in this one is that we're skipping the lineart process entirely, using a refined sketch for coloring instead. Lineart is very laborious, and it is the part of the process the value is noticed less, so we figured we could remove that aspect of production with the hopes of decreasing costs while the perceived value still remains intact.

This one still takes a bit too long to justify earning only $50, so we're going to try again. The characters look good as they are, but backgrounds need to be simplified, and perhaps some of the character details need to be toned down as well. It's a hard balance to reach, as you never know what the Residents are going to have in their comic strips. Some might be simple dialogue, others might be more elaborate visual scenes. So we have to find a system that makes it worth our while, even when the design needs to be a little bit more elaborate.

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Leopard's Lair is a virtual condo for furries in which we live our dream furry life through comics and related art, and share experiences together with the hopes of building a strong sense of community.

We're restructuring at the moment, but we're always glad to welcome new faces. 😸

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