April's Foolery (Patreon)

Hey there!! Way too long, way too little see!! You're probably wondering what the heck I've been up to, so let's dive right in!

Part 1: What happen?

After the last update, I got straight to work drawing that Animal Girlfriends minicomic I mentioned. I was making pretty good progress!

But a seed of worry was growing in my brain. It had to do with itch.io, the platform I usually sell my comics on: For some reason, the site takes quite a long time to process payouts lately. Just to confirm my suspicions, I made a test payout of the handful of dollars in one of my accounts, and sure enough, it took a full two weeks to get through.

So if I wanted to get my taxes paid on time, I'd have to have the comic finished and up for sale by April 1st. Unfortunately, it was like April 5th by the time I realized this, and I was only about 3/4 done. 

Whoops!!!

So I had to scramble to figure out some other way to deal with my financial issues. I won't bore you with the details; the good news is that I did just barely squeak by.

That leaves me in the clear to get this comic done and move onto other stuff! But tax day was weeks ago, right? What have I been doing since then? Well...

Part 2: My Homework Report

One thing about me you should know is that I'm kind of addicted to acquiring new skills. But with the ideas I mentioned in my last post percolating, I have a pretty good excuse for it this time. So over the past month, I've been doing a ton of what you could call "homework."

For example, I took a day or two to brush up on my CSS. The rich media stories I'm working are browser based, so I want to be able to style them smartly -- to have as much control over the layout as I do when making a comic. Luckily, that's actually pretty easy these days! Web design got a lot more flexible since the last time I did any of this seriously. (Which was in, like, 2004...?!)

Then, for some reason, I went on a long, weird deep dive into the world of text adventures? You know, the kind of games where you type "go north" to go north, "take keys" to take keys, etc. I gave myself a crash course in Inform 7, a very cutely-designed language for coding parser-style interactive fiction. 

I ended up coding the bones of an aimless little game about exploring Charmside, and I was really shocked at how -- for lack of a better word -- immersive it felt, even with just a few rooms and a few objects. A text adventure has the power to be immersive in a way even the biggest-budget AAA 3D games kind of can't touch. You can describe the environment in as much detail as anyone could ever want, and allow the player to choose what to focus on. If you want to make something happen in a text adventure, you can just tell the player that it happened and set a few variables -- most "game mechanics" amount to just a few if-then statements under the hood, but they feel no less real to the player.

Also, it can't be overstated that the act of typing is a very powerful way for the player to interact with a game world. You can't help but roleplay when your only input method is to describe your actions in your own words. I added a clothing system so that the player could wear cute outfits; in testing it, I found myself blushing a little when I had to type out explicitly what I wanted to pick up and wear -- even though I'm literally the one who coded it!! I think there's a ton of meat on that particular bone.

Ultimately, a text adventure isn't the kind of thing I want to make in general. The stories I'm interested in telling are strongly directed narratives, and a text adventure is pretty freeform and player-oriented. But this experiment tuned me into a ton of interesting writing and design ideas that I'm really excited to apply, and I'm definitely going to continue fleshing it out as a side project to eventually post up for free.

Anyway, then I went into a weeks-long fugue state and learned 3D modeling.

Okay, let's back it up a bit.

Part 3: My Polygonal Fugue State

Once my tax day disaster was averted, I went back to drawing the Animal Girlfriends mini. The next page I'd scripted was a cutesy little collage of the girls doing fun stuff at the beach. I thought an interesting look would be to draw the scenes in isometric perspective (think Mario RPG or Final Fantasy Tactics -- that kind of diagonal, not-quite-3D projection). That way, all the separate scenes could come together in one panel as if they were happening at the same time on the same plane.

This meant I had to draw characters at kind of an unusual angle, while making sure their poses still read well, and do it a dozen times in a row to boot. I was struggling a bit; my brain kept wanting to "correct" the poses into true perspective, and whenever I redrew them the characters would slide progressively further towards angles I was more comfortable with, throwing the composition off.

I could tell this was going to take ages if I kept bashing my head against it.

A thing about me: I don't use references. This isn't an ideological thing; I don't think that it's wrong to use references, or that doing so would be injurious to my pride, or anything like that!

I guess I just tend to assume that if I'm struggling to draw something, it's a skill problem rather than a knowledge problem. I mean, I know a lot about the human body -- you gotta know the rules before you can break them, right? So if I'm having trouble drawing a body, it's clearly an issue with my coordination, or my planning, or my intuition -- I just need to try and try again until I get it right.

To be sure, I do think this approach has given me some pretty good intuitive skills. But it's based on a flawed premise! And, for some reason, drawing this particular page of this particular comic was the point where I finally realized that.

Okay, I thought. There's a reason artists always have those little wooden dolls, right? Maybe I could run out and buy one of those real quick.

Well... maybe there's some way I could make my own little models?

I opened up Blender, and got to work.

So, to make a long story short: it was actually pretty hard to make my own models. But now I have some, and I have the skills to rapidly make more! And there's something really mind-expanding about seeing a space-filling model of my characters filling space. It really took me aback: Poses that cost me hours to figure out by brute force take minutes when I can just see how they work in 3D!

Anyway, I'm super glad to have taken this particular diversion. I'm still an illustrator at heart, and I have no interest in replacing my process with 3D. But with this new skillset in my toolbox, I can feel my artistic horizons expanding. If nothing else, it means I can get way more creative with my compositions!

Part 4: What's next

I'll be finishing up this comic over the next bit, and it'll go up here on Patreon first. Afterwards, I'm gonna focus on that webby rich media fiction stuff I was going on about last post, where I think all this experimentation will really come to fruition.

I'll see you soon! Thanks for waiting warmly!!