Captain’s Log, 0210208.060

Well, the week of my nativity is over.

Time to actually get serious.

This last week I did what I wanted, when I wanted, and nothing else (except what was required to keep my family and their animals alive, of course). And what I wanted turned out to be the basis of a platforming sequel to my hit game Candy Raid: the factory.

This gif has a lot of little things worth talking about, but let’s get back to it.

I need to either search for a day job, or else gear up to pay my bills with my projects quickly. Option 2 means running a successful crowdfund ASAP. The only project I have that is close to ready for that is Awesome Moments, my Bible Story book.

Because of my social media fast, the earliest I can run the Kickstarter in question effectively is March. If I choose to work my butt off on Hat Trick, or my bestiary, or on this little Candy Raid platformer, I can hypothetically have either of these projects Kickstarter ready by then. But I have to be 100% committed to the project. And my history of underestimating time to completion on projects leads me to believe I’d need at least two months to get either of those ready. And even a successful Kickstarter wouldn’t disburse funds until April.

Which means I need to hunt for a day job.

Sucks to be me, but I’ve been employed at dead-end day jobs for 15 years, and I’ve done the starving artist thing for 6 months. Being jobless definitely helps my projects, but not by giving me more time, but rather by giving me consistent time. If I can get something with regular hours, I should be able to keep my productivity close to the same.

If not, such is life. So let’s talk about how we are going to change our approaches to Vargenstone and Everything Else as a result.

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Captain’s Log, 0210201.073: Keep Moving Forward

Here are pictures of the Night Mare, in roughly the order I made them:

No relation to today’s post whatsoever. I just lined these up because I wanted to, and I find WordPress’s gallery convenient for the task.

This is my yearly custom of pausing and considering my life’s path and whether I want to continue on current lines, or what course adjustments I should make. As such, there will be an over abundance of navel gazing.

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Drams Æther

Æther is measured in drams, which are also the unit of currency in many lands where the substance is harvested and used in various machinations. The units are as follows. Four drams (4ᵭ) to the nip. 3 nips (3ꬻ) to the gil (1ꬶ). 1ꬶ of aether is about a teacupfull liquid radiant. Dram coins frequently (depending on the local culture) have an aether crystal set in the coin itself, whereas larger denominations of coins are theoretically exchangeable for aether. Seximal and duodecimal denominations are normal for other currencies.

Of course, a 1 gil aether stone may be worth considerably more or considerably less depending on the intensity and nature of the radiance stored therein and on market forces.

This is what I mean.

Take a model that looks like this:

Pose it like this:

And then ‘trace’ it, only, pushing and changing and ignoring and tweaking to get the look I actually want.

And with ink:

Status Report 0210118.053

Vargenstone

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.

Hat Trick

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Captain’s Log 0201211.075, Just a couple more pages, boss…

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.

Update

There we go, hoss.

Methinks I should try something new.

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.

Captain’s Log 0201111.080, It’s DONE!

89 pages!

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.

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Captain’s Log, 0201109.122

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.

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.

Captain’s Log 0201106.130: Error for margins

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.