I have ’til the end of the month to find a new home.
I’m also mildly between jobs. I say ‘mildly’ because while I have lost one job, I have been hired for another. But I haven’t started yet.
I have also spent the last week and a half laid low by a turbo-cold from hell. Fortunately, my job doesn’t start yet. Hate to show up on the first day sick as a dog.
That doesn’t even begin to sum up the constellation of pain points I currently stare at, but it will have to suffice, as the remaining gripes are best not broadcast to the public at large.
If it weren’t for that constellation of pain points, I’d be rather enthused. I have finally squared the circle.
I have finally found an art workflow and toolchain that allows me to produce ‘hand-drawn’ graphics as quickly and painlessly as pixel-art.
I’ve decided to focus in on bug world. Since Sally likes bugs. And the bug world character designs are simple, segmented, expressive, ideal to work with.
Hopefully I’ll have a platformer ready in a month or two to pitch to Kickstarter or to a publisher. And my career as an indie game dev can properly launch. And perhaps I will be sufficiently solvent to keep a roof over my head most of the time.
But that does not give me a roof next month, nor do anything about the shit storm that even now faces me.
Mostly, I’m doing it, working on it, because of the aforementioned turbo-cold. I’m not sure what I could do for house-hunting (or job-hunting) that I’m not already doing without the cold. But as I am flat on my back, I can draw. Drawing does not require the wherewithal to stand.
The Lord has provided for me well thus far, despite my many foibles. I am not panicked. But I am frustrated by how little I can contribute to my own rescue at this time.
I regard Visual Novels as a legitimate form of media. But I, personally, can’t bring myself to make one. Oh, I’ve toyed with it from time to time…
..but there’s some internal resistance. Part of it is my mind classifies a VN as a video game, and I dislike video games that focus on story over gameplay. “Might as well be a book or a comic.”
But a new paradigm has emerged in my mind. What if a VN isn’t a videogame. What if it is a multimedia comic, with interaction built in?
In reality, it is its own hybrid genre, and that’s fine. But I am increasingly considering making these hyper comics. Perhaps with platforming or RPG segments in them. Tiny essays in fiction and gamecraft, that try to be the best presentation of a story I can make, but do not try to live up to the genre demands of a Metroidvania, or even a VN.
Unless I can start making money faster, I can’t keep it for long.
I have one more week at my current day job, then another six months doing it at reduced hours. Reduced hours is nice. Gives me more time to work on comics and books. Doesn’t make me money faster.
I think I’m going to focus on games.
My kid loves games.
I love games.
My pixel art tools feed into my running comic, if I want to get it running again.
I am continuing to debate and storyboard and plan on my breaks at work. But this is increasingly my position.
In the progression that starts “On the one hand…” and continues “On the other hand…” mainstream English may add “on the third hand…” even though most people don’t have three hands. Among hackers, it is just as likely to be “on the gripping hand”. This metaphor supplied the title of Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle’s 1993 SF novel “The Gripping Hand” which involved a species of hostile aliens with three arms (the same species, in fact, referenced in juggling eggs). As with TANSTAAFL and con, this usage became one of the naturalized imports from SF fandom frequently observed among hackers.
I was looking for a quote from Wikipedia or something that referred to the Niven/Pournelle Puppeteers rather than to hacker culture. I am hacker culture adjacent rather than hacker culture proper: we have common ancestors. But whatever. This will do.
I have recently lamented my lack of motion for the last several months on comics, and on vidya.
Comics stings because I fancy myself a cartoonist. Vidya stings because it is the medium where I am both most likely to make an impact, and most likely to make a dollar. I’d like a dollar and an impact.
But this is ignoring the medium where I’ve done my best work. For which I am most suited. Which is, perhaps, most needful. Kids’ books.
But harder to sell than comics, which are harder to sell than games.
Jump the Shark & Paruvrew perfected, in January, a process of kids’ book composition I began developing years ago. Not perfected as in I can’t improve any longer. There is always room for improvement. Perfected as in the book is what I’ve always thought the books could be. The various forces I oppose crank out children’s book after children’s book. And I like it rather better than making comics, even though I have more training. I can compress boring moments into a single image and facing text, or stretch out important moments over multiple pages or even multiple panels as though it were a comic.
The production of a single book fits my attention span. My interests in literature and illustration are well-adapted to the task. I can animate, I can write code, and I can cartoon, but in many ways it feels as though I have always been prepared for the task of making kids’ books. And I am proud of most of my work, and consider even the book I am not proud of a necessary part of the learning process.
The sticking points:
I will always yearn to make games
I have an ongoing comic and it’s not fair to leave it hanging
I don’t know how to make money with this.
The counterpoints:
If I do make money making books, I can make games as a hobby
If I do make money making books, I can catch up and finish the comic
This feels, more than anything else, like a calling to me
I need to pray. I need to eat something. And I need to figure out how to squeeze time into my workweek to produce something. Anything.
Last time I held forth on this blog, I mentioned that I am a cartoonist who does not cartoon and this needs to stop.
However, my most successful endeavors have not been cartooning, but making children’s books and games. And back in July, as my mother was whisked off to the hospital, I cobbled together a solid entry for a game jam, namely Royal Pain, which got a post-mortem here, and was the centerpiece of my blog post on July and August.
Vidya has a lot to recommend it, not least of which is the fact that I love the medium as much as I love newspaper comic strips as a medium, or the fact that my long running comic has a compatible art style.
Should I shift from cartoonist to indie game developer with a style somewhere between ink and retro pixels? Well…
Homeless does not mean roofless. For the last several years, I have been employed as my mother’s caretaker. With her passing this August, my status has officially changed from welcome guest to squatter on her undistributed estate. If the courts do not sell off her estate, and my brother’s stated hope of putting it in a trust shared by me and my siblings comes to pass, I will once again be a legitimate resident.
There is the possibility of the estate being sold to pay off my mother’s debts some time in the future, and my family being cast onto the charity of my friends for a time. But if it comes to pass, I do have friends who will take us in until we are able to house ourselves. So far, so good.
However, the estate was payed for and maintained by my mother’s income, my income, and my sister’s income. My mother no longer draws a paycheck, being deceased. As I and my sister were employed as her caretakers, we became jobless. I have since gotten custodial work, which suits me greatly, but it does not replace my sister’s income nor my mother’s.
And it takes time. A great privilege of working for the state as a caretaker for my mother was that I got to spend much of my time cleaning and repairing the farm, teaching my children, and writing books and games and comics. When I launched this blog, I was scratching and scrabbling for any way to make my creative pursuits into a profitable business. During the last couple years, despite my income as a caretaker being too small for comfort, I have taken advantage of the security and time to pursue whatever interests me, developing my skill as an author, programmer, illustrator and cartoonist. And I’m glad I did. Jump the Shark and Paruvrew is the first book I’ve put out that approaches the level of quality that I’ve been certain I could reach this entire time.
But now that must change. Custodial work will not keep the lights on and the house warmed. I must either find a day job that pays the bills, or I must turn my creative pursuits into a profitable business. And since I do not know the future or the mind of God, the wisest course is to pursue both until one seems likely to succeed.
And I don’t cartoon anymore.
I have some voice acting work that I hope to ramp up this weekend. And I’ve considered making short videos or podcasts and putting them on YouTube etcetera for darn near 20 years now. And as I was sweeping the floors of my new employer yesterday, I was rehearsing a bit in my head, when I realized that in my head, I call myself a cartoonist, but I haven’t cartooned in months.
I have cartooned while holding down a full time day job before. But at present I’m not equipped to do so. I have been relying on the fact that I work for my mom in the presence of my full studio for the last couple years.
I don’t have time to fix that right now. I have to go to work in ten minutes. And I may need to buy some supplies that will have to wait until next week when I get paid. But I’m throwing this blog post out into the aether as a way of putting the issue on the front burner.
After all, it’s a bit silly for a man to call himself a cartoonist if he never cartoons.
Likely, I will have to change my methodology. I will have to make it less reliant on digital tools, more on analogue tools. It’s probably fine to continue working on John Michael Jones in full color and with pixel art, as when it resumes, it will resume issuing forth once per week. But I may need to make it hand-drawn and black and white to get it out at all, and it may be best for me to start making black and white comics in general, and trying to get something out quite a bit faster.
And I do need to consider whether I ought to continue with the 2×2 panel, 8×9 format I’ve been using for John Michael, or return to the 1×3 panel, 6×9 format I created for Bunny Trail Junction. Or adopt some other
There are other thoughts I have that have bearing. Thoughts about making games and running kickstarters. They need to be addressed, but it is time for me to leave for work now.
This is the last bit of the summary of 2023 I just wrote, but isolated to avoid tonal whiplash and because I need to zoom in quite a bit.
In August 2020, I moved back home to Minnesota. I had been living with family in New Jersey, working at [Retail Giant] before that. And before that, living in an apartment with my wife and kid, working at [Retail Giant], in Minnesota. But some time in 2019 or 2020, my mom had to have heart surgery and I realized that if I didn’t actually live with her, I wouldn’t be able to be present for her next medical crisis.
My whole life her health has not been great. While I was in New Jersey, 3 of my 4 grandparents passed away, and I was unable to go to the funeral.
There were other reasons for leaving Jersey behind, but I especially wanted to be on hand to care for my mother.
I went from retail to retail at first. Not [Retail Giant]. Another company. But in October of 2021, my mother suffered an aneurysm, was in a coma for a month, and came home needing constant care. I was able to work as her assistant. Get paid just enough to cover the bills to do what I was going to do anyway. And I could spend all day, every day, teaching my kid, and working on books and games so long as I was available at a moment’s notice.
When my day job was stocking shelves, I focused heavily on the question of how I could monetize my creative work? How can I spin this up into a business? How can I get paid to make things?
But while serving as my mother’s assistant, I did not. I let myself relax a little. Explore. I figured, since the bills were paid for a while, I’d explore what I wanted, and I’d focus on being practical later.
Two or three earth-shaking events have conspired to come together recently. One of which is I have a subscriber on Subscribestar. Which means I need to take that seriously and publish regular progress reports on what I’m doing and what I’ve done so my subscriber feels his money is well spent.
At the highest level, too.
That’s not the most earth-shaking earth-shaker either.
So let me review my work in the Year of Our Lord 2023 from January ’til September 11th, and I shall try to keep both a monthly and weekly log going forward. This post covers everything to June, and then July and August have their own post.
I’ve pushed the visual novel thing as far as I care to. I’ve been pushing most of a month. I even created a storyboard book and storyboarded part of a visual novel.
And it occurred to me one day of work in that if I made a simple platformer with the same story, I would like the result better. Even though the story offers no appreciable terrain to explore, no powerups, and a handful of monsters. Even though in traditional platformer terms, it’s one or two levels tops. I would still rather have the story as a platformer than as a VN.
And my experiments in Inkscape and HD 2D art were brought back up, and.. well..
The reason I’ve been avoiding making this..
..and instead have been working on this..
..is that I feel I have something to add to JRPG mechanics. But to platformer mechanics, everything I love about them has already been done. I have no seed of innovation in me; only room for practice and refinement.
And a platformer with one or two levels isn’t a platformer. Not really. And yet. Why not make them though?
The problem with JRPGs is the same as with Visual Novels. I have no joy in the creation. I have ideas. I have things I want to cause to exist. But I do not want to do the work. Conversely, comic books, kids’ books, these things I not only want to exist, but I want to do the work that causes them to exist. And therefore I have published comics and kids’ books. Because I want to do the work.
Platformers too.
This doesn’t offer anything new. I don’t have a Jump the Shark story that is worth making a Sonic Clone, neither have I a mechanic that justifies a new game. But it was a blast to make And I put it together in a month or two.
So why not take those stories I think would be good VNs and make them platformers instead? Sure, they’ll be small. Sure, it’s not the epic of all time. Sure, the mechanics are retreads. But why not? The mechanics of VNs are retreads. The mechanics of comics are retreads.
Moreover, to become good at making any sort of game, you have to do it more than once. Making a bunch of micro platformers will make me better at making platformers. Eventually, as I have finally made a kids’ book that is pretty good, I will make a game that is pretty good.
So I dusted off a little generic platformer character I made a while back. Idea: make a platformer mechanics base. Create skins over it for different stories and characters, turning on and off powers as needed.
And my wheels spun. This little dude is cute and all, but he isn’t interesting to me.
New tactic: take the Wren story I was going to turn into a VN; turn it into a mini story platformer. Time to take old attempts at Wren and recontextualize her in my platformer proportions standards.
On the left we have an older version of making her as vector art, but with the scale wrong and the lines the wrong width. In the middle, the new/correct stands with Arthur and Jump for comparison. Experimentation with a pixel art version has shown that replacing the belly shirt with a tank top is fine. The real advantage of the belly shirt was not the exposed navel, but the exposed shoulders, segmenting off the arms and making them easier to animate and to read. Same as Mario’s overalls. For some reason, it pleased me to put giant clodhoppers on her feet.
One of Wren’s struggles since the original design was differentiating her from Shantae. Especially as, being me, I cannot produce the shameless cavalcade of prurient designs Wayforward can. Ditching the belly shirt goes most of the way. I have also replaced her ponytail with a tuft. I liked the ponytail more, but the tuft is iconic, easier to animate, and more reflective of Wren’s personality. And it goes the rest of the way. For this new version, I made the tuft more interesting and less blobby.
One of the curious side-effects is that I no longer feel the cape is necessary for modesty, and it hugely complicates animation, and it will make people think of Hollow Knight. So for practical purposes, I should ditch the cape. And I probably will.
But I like it. I have sold myself on the blue and orange triangles shape language.
Well. I’ll probably ditch the cape for the first game, for simplicity. Add it in later.
So, yeah. Probably try and make a little platformer next month. See how it goes.
In my last post, I did some multiplication to figure out which method of telling stories is the best for my goals, and Visual Novels won hands down.
But every time I sit down to work on a sample visual novel, nothing happens.
Any number times zero is zero. If I will not produce the media, it is worthless to me and to everyone else.
This is not a giving up on Visual Novels as a medium. This is an acknowledgement that if I am going to make them, it will be some other time in some other way.
Logic Monkey Media 