Vargenstone remains where it was last time I last time I spoke…
…and while I am going to try and get some serious work on it done this week, I’m not going to stress over it while I’m the only guy changing anything.
Theria
Meanwhile, I feel like I’m done with the virtual pet for now. Not permanently, but I was doing it to scratch an itch and the itch is scratched. I will probably continue adding pages to the book storyboard at a rate of one or two per week so that I’ve have a huge head start when the project gets the limelight.
This week has been a bit of a trick. Members of my house had major surgery. I was blessed by God and my brother with a building, which I had to help drag to the farm I live on.
The Awesome Moments storyboard remains where it was on Monday. Work on the Candy Raid promo art got done.
I have two more days to this workweek, today and tomorrow. Assuming a minimum of 2 pages per day, that’s 4+ more pages. So, when we hit the ground running on Monday, we’ll see how that went.
I have been toying over the last few weeks with the ideas of taking Sunday and Wednesday off rather than Saturday and Sunday. I tried it out this week, and I think that will be my pattern moving forward.
Psychologically, I’ve noticed my love for Hat Trick has been creeping back. I started on Awesome Moments last month with the assumption that when the storyboard was done, of course I’d Kickstart Awesome Moments first. It’s my most important work after all. But now I am content when this leg of this journey is done to pick up the next leg of the last journey.
Not to mention my January and perhaps February are spoken for.
It’ll be amusing (to me at least) if I produce nothing really in 2020, but come out the gate swinging with multiple products in 2021 because I spent all of 2020 laying the foundations for them.
I’m going to do my pages now. My plan is to do the bare minimum each day to progress, then switch over to work on my RPG engine. However, if the mood strikes to do more than the minimum, I will let the muse have her way. Ciao.
Yeah, I think I’ve used this pose a little too obsessively lately.
Oh well. The pic of Jenny (the rabbit) was only meant to be concept art anyhow. It’ll do.
But on the bright side, I finished the promo picture for Candy Raid!
… dang it!
Hopefully, I’m done with Candy Raid for the foreseeable future. Now, I can focus on the more excellent work of finishing the Awesome Moments storyboard, all the while wishing I was making my RPG instead.
The story is finished. Here are the next steps I plan:
Produce an additional 10 or so pages of character art/random illustrations in a finished state.
Make the damn book out of the storyboard pages, with the extra pages slotted in.
Have a printer’s proof made thereof.
Let it lie for at least one month.
Run a Kickstarter to fund editing and production.
If the Kickstarter funds, make a comic book!
I think I’m gonna spend a couple months playing with vidya. Running a Kickstarter in December is unwise because everyone’s broke with the Christmas spending. Running a Kickstarter in January is unwise because everyone is still broke with the Christmas spending. But February? February is fine. February is more than fine. People are starting to get their tax returns in.
We are inching ever forward. The climax is storyboarded, all that remains is the denoument. The storyboard may well be finished this week. Not sure how it’ll go after that. Probably I’ll do a print proof using the storyboard art just and, say, 10 pages of original drawings just to give room for any extra I have to add in the second draft. This way we’ll see how bad my margin error is. Then take a month or two off from this project to let it settle before working on revisions.
85 pages and counting!
I continue to tinker around the edges with my Piqha RPG. If it works out well, frankly it makes more sense for me to tell future Hat Trick stories as mini RPGs. But at this precise moment it’s more me feeling an unmet need to write a little code. I think I may duplicate last year, though, and turn December into an attempt to get the prototype of the RPG up and running. We’ll see.
Well, crap. I’ve been doing something wrong this whole time, and now that I’m 80 pages in, it’s gonna be a beast to fix.
My template is set up so that the panels bump right into the gutter.
There should be a sliver of a margin between the gutter and the panel border unless I’m intentionally running a panel into the gutter (which I do, from time to time).
I think I’m going to do a test print of the storyboard as is, so we’ll see how much of a problem it is before I set out to fix it, but… bro.
That said, 10 pages storyboarded this week, bringing the total to 81 penciled and 83 paneled and lettered.
That’s a full week of storyboarding. I am done making promises I’m constitutionally unlikely to keep, though. I will be pushing forward on Hat Trick next week, and I will be tinkering around with my piqha RPG, but we will see what actually happens.
The new pages can be found on SubscribeStar, per the norm.
Lost all of last week. My tent was well suited to my working at a slow but steady rate, but now winter is making overtures.
By the weekend I had settled on converting the basement into an art dungeon. And then I injured my knee, rendering large quantities of stair-climbing inadvisable.
My knee is just about good enough now that I can start building my art dungeon tomorrow. However, I also have a lot of busywork to catch up on unrelated to my comic, so my objective for this week is to catch up on responsibilities, and maybe, hopefully get a page or two done. My ultimate objective is to handle all my potential excuses so that I have no excuses remaining next week.
The right-hand page seems like a good one for ad purposes.
This week I kept a steady pace. No sudden jumps forward, and the only missed day was yesterday, due to an early morning medical appointment, which is the first time I’ve skipped a day for totally legitimate reasons. Here’s what my storyboard folder looks like:
I strongly suspect that I can make my panels and text a lot smaller. Fit more story into less space. I’m not going to do it for this book because it’s better to finish than to risk stalling out by starting over.
Ideally, I would have made a small book of 20-30 pages at this scale, printed it, and then made the judgement call. But that’s not the way it worked out this time. I’m making a big-ass comic book instead. God help me.
