Merry Christmas!

It's been a few months since I updated the excuse calender.

Turns out working as an unpaid sprite animator does not pay the bills.

This long period of unemployment has depleted nearly all of my resources, and I am planning a trip to North Dakota, in hopes of finding work.

Merry Christmas, I hope you spent it with people you love.

Job interview in the morning

I have a job interview tomorrow.

This will mean even less time for Torn and even making sprites, but I sure could use the money.

Well, okay then.

Haven't been getting much drawing done, and most of the drawing I do is sprites, rather than comics.

Just be glad this isn't going to turn into a sprite comic right?

I got a rough sketch out, for the first panel. I'm not sure I like the composition, but I don't want things to get confusing to early.

I've been putting this off, because I've been arguing with myself over pacing issues. I decided to speed things up, as the audience is likely to get sick of Grom's leering mug, before this is over.

Drunk Duck Mirror

Due to the fact I can't get them to display the way I'd like here, I'm also uploading the comics to a DrunkDuck account, where the templates are a little more flexible, since it's designed to handle this sort of thing.

I know a guy who says he knows a guy who would give me some webspace, but I'd rather use some soft of template-equipped service, due to the aforementioned lack of HTML skills.

The fate of this blog is up in the air, but it lives. --for now.

Complexization

Well, it's quite a while past "next Wednesday" and the comic isn't ready.

I've finally finished the art for the first panel. The actual work all happened last night, but the rest of the time between now and then was well spent. I spent a fair amount of it staring at the panel and murmuring darkly.

There were a lot of things I had forgotten to do, and I could tell it wasn't finished. Tonight, I achieved clarity, and the work moved forward. I added five new lighting layers (3 titled "Fires below", one "heavens above", and one "darkness within") and added in a cloak, that was present in the sketch, but somehow absent in the final linework. It adds considerable weight to the character in the center of the panel, and balances the image a lot better.

I should probably add some more shading layers to the principal background object, to give it texture, but I'll leave that decision for after I get the other two panels into an acceptable state. These panels are smaller and less detailed, so things should go faster.

I'm not really happy with the experiment I did with the linework on this one, but I should probably make the page consistent.

Must find lost spark

So now I'm jobless again. Have been for a couple of weeks.

There's nothing physically preventing me from posting here, and really making this successful is probably the project most personally important to me right now, but I just haven't been able to make myself do it.

I'm going to have this page done in the next seven days. That's three panels, one of them larger and more detailed, in less time than I've wasted on the first panel. This course of action is likely to lead me to conflict with my brother, who will want to play League of Legends on the computer my files are on, so I'll be moving my working pages to the public folder, so I can get them from over the network.

Dear Lord, My Hands!

This job I've taken is an intense workout for the fingers.

My strength and skill have increased enough now, that I can type this entry on the third day of my three day weekend, without needing to take painkillers and anti-inflammatory drugs first.

Re-joining society is proving troublesome, and my car breaks down every time I fix it, so it may be some time yet before the page is finished, but I can actually return to working on it, a small bit every week. That's something I guess.

True grit and honor demand that I move forward.

I am a valued member of society!

I accepted a job offer yesterday.

I am not giving up on this project. I've put too many months of preparation into it.

However, it does mean that my hiatus will be longer than planned.

Bloody poor way to start a comic, but you just have to roll with the punches, sometimes.

If I can get through this, I'll be ready for whatever comes next.

Oh, yeah.

I promised you guys a title page, didn't I?

Here it is.



This should have gone up before the page before, and should color your understanding appropriately.

Page 2 is still sitting unfinished, as I'm still technically doing sprites instead of comics. I'm going to put some time in on the bits that have me really stuck tonight, but there is much yet to do, and many other demands on my time.

I'm still planning to redesign the layout, so you don't have to click for full size comics, etc. There's less time table there than for comics proper though.

Complications

I am not dead, but I will become dead in the future. Hopefully, I will finish the second page before that happens.

Getting this second page done is quite a bit harder than I anticipated, and I'm getting less time to work on it than I'd hoped.

I lost a couple of days each to Star Trek Online, some kind of digestive tract infection and GalCiv2, but I'm back on track now.

Unfortunately, I've been presented with a limited time opportunity to do something more productive than work on this comic.

You see, I'm an unemployed game designer. I don't have any money, and I don't make any money, and I don't have a very impressive resume. Opportunities to [ad out my portfolio are rare and they don't last long.

A guy I know needs some sprites made for a game he's working on, and he offered me the chance to make some, in exchange for attributions and a place in the credits. I only got this opportunity because he knows me really well and I already do some memory management optimizations on his project.

I can come back to this comic after the project is done, but I can't join the project after the comic is done. If I want this, and I really do, I need to strike while the iron is hot. I'm going to take the job.

Due to the way creative energy flows, I may post a couple of pages during the project, but for the most part, I'll be focusing on sprites. If the project actually releases, I'll make a post here so you, the hypothetical reader, will be able to see the cause of the delay.

Let's see if blogger can handle this.

I'm not really sure how badly blogger is going to mangle this, but:



BAM!

Hm...

You can click on the image for full size, but it was composed to be view on a black background.

That isn't a concession that I made to the black background, but the reason I chose black in the first place. It has always been my intention for these to appear over black. It's important, and if I can't make that happen, I'll be taking my comic to a more traditional comic hosting service.

I'm going to fangle with this thing a bit more, but my HTML chops are not up to this, and time spent reading up on margins and sidebars is time not spent drawing comics.

Things Not Going As Planned

I've recovered from the STO beta, but there sttill isn't a comic ready. I needed a couple of days to eat, sleep and re-hydrate, after the beta.

There was little time left, and I was determined to see if the lack of proper auto-fire on the second tier ships completely ruins the otherwise excellent space combat.(It does.)

Exploration missions where still buggy, but very promising when beta ended, and the only real problem with ground combat is that the ally AI is completely retarded. Some building tilesets wreck their pathfinding AI, and they are never very good about not pulling in a bunch of enemy squads at once.

Anyway, The first page is essentially done, and once I get the formatting adjusted to accommodate it it will be uploaded.

I'd apologize for all this, but this blog isn't open to the public yet, so there's no-one to disappoint but myself.

Progress will continue to be slow, as my computer access is going to be much more restricted in the coming days. The person who owns the computer I use has started using it himself, and I suppose he has a right to it. Beggars ought not be whiners.

Wasn't there going to be a comic?

I finished the first page, though I reserve the right to change the text some more before I upload it.

I believe it was Tolkien who said, "Revise. Revise. Revise."

That's not the only reason I haven't uploaded it, though. I've decided to add in another page before it.

It'll be a title page, informing you that this first chapter is a short prologue.

Page 2 is not progressing as fast as I'd hoped, mostly due to our new roommate's X-Box 360s. It is a potent pair of machines, and they have demanded a sizable tax on my free time. However, now that everybody has beaten Borderlands and Castle Crashers at least once, life seems to be returning to normal.

I hope to have the title page up by this evening, but I have errands to run, and the guy who actually owns this computer is going to want to use it at some point, so I make no promises.

Edit: Oh, dear. I just finished downloading the Star Trek Online Beta. What was I thinking?

Look on the bright side, I'm completely broke, so I'll have to stop playing when the game launches in a few days. See you then.

Apparently, you need a beta key, even in the "open" phase of this beta. Does this mean we need a new term for open betas that are actually open?

Where I Am

Right now I have the composite image for the first page complete, and most of the large panel for the second page.

Each page will typically contain one panel that is larger and more detailed than the others. I'll generally put more than half of the time on a given comic into the large panel. This allows me to decompress the storytelling a bit, and still have time to deliver visuals that aren't total crap.

The first page is mostly being held up by my inability to decide on a font and letterbox style. However, I also keep re-writing the text to be displayed.

You see, all the first page needs to do is pan over the lakefront to establish the setting for the scene. No textual information is really required at this stage. Nevertheless, you should never start a comic with a textless page. I've seen it done and it doesn't work.

The text pulls your eyes through the panels one at a time, and provides the right sense of time and rhythm, until the story get's started. I'm thinking neutral verbs or verbless sentence fragments in un-punctuated allcaps, with black text on pale yellow boxes, an inset black border, and no contractions. The big panel should have more text, because then the reader's eye will dwell there longer.

Maybe, I'll use an ellipsis somewhere, but I don't want to get that cliche' so soon.

The second page just needs me to belt out some more action panels. --action panels about a guy reading something. I've got a way to keep it interesting...

I am yet to tweak the page templates as well. So much to do.

Where You Are

You are looking at the very first post of my new blog.

If everything goes according to plan (though I don't see any reason to think it will, as things rarely go according to plan) it probably isn't new anymore.

This is something of an experiment. You see, I'm starting a webcomic, but not content to do one thing at a time I am also starting this blog to house it, and chronicle it's development.

If blogger proves inadequate, I may migrate to another blog service, but I shall try to migrate the existing posts if I do.

Normally, the rants are subordinate to the webcomic, but as Shamus Young has demonstrated, this need not be the case. You can embed a comic in an entire blog full of rants, and it's just fine, so long as you manage to get the "Next" button on the right and the "Previous" button on the left. (There doesn't seem to be a hard rule like that for blogs, but God help you if you get it backwards on a webcomic.

Notice that there will never be any incomplete comics in here. It would set a bad precedent for me as a writer and artist, so you only get to hear about the process, not see it. Sketches and non-cannon strips may abound, but only if I can enable smooth trawling, in spite of them.

So long as I have a whole blog I may post about other things, but only if I can be certain that it won't interfere with a smooth archive trawl. If this proves to troublesome, I may simply pull up stakes for a more traditional comics hosting service. Priorities!

I may edit more information in below, but I intend to preserve the post around for the proper sense of history. It's a matter of atmospherics.