Backstage Pass #7 (Patreon)

On this week's edition of Backstage Pass, we'll be taking a look at...

The projected length for OBT! This is a bit of an oddball one that I think will be interesting to look at later on when I approach the end of the comic.

When working on OBT, it's difficult to quantify exactly how many pages are gonna go into a chapter until I'm finally thumbnailing it all out. My general goal is to keep each chapter under 50 pages (with a hard limit of 100 on some that will inevitably end up longer), which is a limit that has been helpful for getting me to be creative with combining or reducing pages by more thoroughly editing scenes. 

The chapter system is directly based off of PMD: Sky's chapters, meaning that they begin and end around the same points, and considering the game has 20 chapters plus the epilogue, that's about what I have planned for OBT. Considering some of the in-game chapters are very short (just a cutscene or a minigame), though with some of the story tweaks I have in mind, they may very well end up just as long as some of the more plot-dense chapters.

Handling the epilogue of the game is a whole different story, and I've been considering how I want to explore it. I do think I'll pick and choose certain plot points (I have some fun ideas in mind for Sky Peak), but figuring out exactly what I want to cut is an ordeal. There's also a small part of me that wants to extend the epilogue further with the addition of the seven wonders of the world missions, but that'll just be a mystery until I get there with OBT's outline.

Because of this, I've given OBT a bit of a generous estimate of being anywhere from 800-1200 pages long. Which is quite a bit of story! Considering the next page will mark page 100, being 1/8th to 1/12th completion feels simultaneously like I'm a lot further ahead than I thought, yet so far away. Doing the math for weekly updates it seems a bit daunting; the comic could take anywhere from 8 to 25 years to complete depending on update frequency and page count (unless if I started updating 3 times a week, which would speed things along even more). It feels strange to quantify the comic this way, but I hope I'll continue it through the end. I certainly don't plan on ending it anytime soon, and enjoy sharing the journey with readers!