Weekly Update - 132 (Patreon)

Hm... I've promised I would try to deliver spoiler-free previews each week, but how do I preview the next page without spoilering...  Dunno, but here's a paw.

Max Character Sheet is almost* ready. As usual, I love Max until I hate him, because he never quite turns out as cute as he looks in my head. There's always something that strikes me as just... OFF.  And I know that if it bugs me now, it'll REALLY bug me a week from now. It's far enough along where I can either post it as is with a few finishing touches and have it be merely okay, or I can take a little bit more time to fix some things with it that are bothering me so that it's better than merely okay. I'm leaning towards the latter. There's also a bunch of other site art that's bugging me now that I want to fix up... it's really an endless cycle. I need to be better organized.

Comic this week? That's the plan!

Drawing: Max Character Sheet, Page 151, Other Site art, Patron rewards

Playing: Nothing special this week. My desire to play games has been temporarily smushed by my desire to design my own.

Ramble:

There's two ways my creativity sort of manifests itself for me. I have an artistic need, a need to draw and create things that cannot be defined in words: images and visual media. But I also have a more logical craving, a need to write and to create something that is structured and logical. It's kind of always been this way for me, even since I was very young, drawing comics instead of doing my homework.

For a long time now I've strived to strike a balance inside of my own head, going back and forth between the two, utilizing creativity in both artistic and more logical areas. Often this took the form of dabbling in art for awhile, then designing games for awhile. Making comics is sort of drawing and writing in tandem, which is why it's so satisfying for me, I think. However, like I've said in the past, the part of the comic I'm drawing now was written many years ago, there's not a lot of room to change or tweak things or even refine things better. At the moment, it's just a matter of getting through the art part of it.  As a result, the logical/language part of my brain isn't getting a ton of exercise.  (The weekly ramble doesn't really count, since it's mostly just vomiting brain words out onto a screen in a stream of consciousness, which isn't quite the same as writing, editing, editing, editing, editing and ultimately ripping my hair out over the absolute best place to use the word, "ain't")

This weekend I started dabbling into game design again.  A few months ago, Quinn recommended I pick up the book Blades in the Dark, a TTRPG system that is in line with the Dishonored series and other similar gritty, dark, eldritch steampunk fantasy settings. I got the book because it sounded interesting, but it sat gathering dust on my "to read" pile until just a couple of weeks ago, when I finally felt ready to dive into a brand new game system and digest it thoroughly.

Blades in the Dark is a very interesting system. There's a little bit of overlap with the World of Darkness series, I think, but it also has a lot of ideas for how to handle certain things in a way that's, at the very least, unique to me. There's a lot of things to like there. Mayhaps I will coerce my friends into playing it with me some day so I can explore the system more thoroughly, but for now, reading through its various chapters is giving me... ideas.

As is often the case when I consume media, it's started the logical part of my creative brain churning in a lot of good ways. Like I've said, some day, far, far, FAAAR, in the future, (perhaps even after I've finished telling Kiva's story) I'd like to put out my own game system with Kuserra as the setting. Blades in the Dark seems to have an open license to allow others to use their game system, with credit, but I doubt I'll go that route simply because I have a lot of my own ideas on how to handle things... things I can't talk about because UGH, SPOILERZ. In any case, I would much prefer building my own system and creating something new, rather than simply repurposing Blade in the Dark's systems to my setting.

I could probably ramble on and on about game design for some time if you guys are interested in that.  I've learned a fair few things, but I'm no Masahiro Sakurai.