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This is my last post in this run of “Incomplete Works” but I foresee that I will add more in the future when the following happens:

1)  I inevitably start and subsequently run out of steam on a new project.

2) I want to talk about myself again without actually directly talking about myself.

Ego - A pixelated author self insertion character.

Today’s incomplete work is therefore highly relevant as we’re on the theme of talking about myself.  Today is Ego.

Ego is a game that I have been building with the help of Game Maker , a fantastic easy-to-learn deeper-than-you-think game development environment that utilises its own very easy to pick up language and is loved by many many startup indie game developers.  I consider myself to now be a hobbiest indie game developer having made the horrendously difficult and un-enjoyable Pavlov’s Keyboard (I dare you to have fun) and now this little project.

The game is about creativity and how we often create copies of ourselves in our work.  It’s largely a reaction to a lot of my comic work where I have a tendency to draw myself as main characters, or an abstraction of my personality as the main character and it’s a trait that I know others possess as well.  Needless to say, the playable character in Ego is a pixelated version of myself just to drive the point home.

Ego is in an alpha state at present.  The basic gameplay is there, although there are a few occasional glitches that I can’t quite figure out with the sound and occasionally controls, but it’s largely just graphical and doesn’t actually break the game.

In the tradition of some of my favourite indie studios, I thought I’d offer my initial playable build for feedback and potential enjoyment.  One recent victim player got very stuck on one of the levels and started trying to solve it in a rather unusual way and I’d be interested to see if anyone else does the same.

Download Ego – Windows only – .rar file that extracts a single playable .exe

Oh, and just as a quick warning:  It’s very short at the moment.  The equivalent of a comic that has hit the ten-page mark.

Additional Notes:

Indie studio that is taking the novel concept of a completely open alpha phase:  Wolfire Games.  These are the guys behind Lugaru, and more recently the Humble Bundles, which have been an incredibly fresh, interesting and overwhelmingly well received idea.  Their open alpha involves distributing the current alpha build to everyone that has pre-ordered the game, allowing them to see exactly how the game is progressing and offers a remarkably deep insight into how these things are made.  Their site is worth a look and their blog is worth subscribing to, even if the open alpha doesn’t interest you.

I know not everyone uses windows, but really, industry standard and all.  If Steam have only just started offering things on Mac and the only other companies producing for Mac are quirky ones like Blizzard or Maxis, then I feel justified in the excuse of “I am not those stuidos”.  I can barely grasp what’s going on in the programming here and it’s insultingly simple.

Also, I’m not sure I fully comprehend what Linux is.  It sounds like some kind of cat.  Maybe an open source cat.

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After reading the Order of the Stick last year, I was quite keen to try and launch a web comic again.  In order to not be too ambitious, I wanted something that I could do a regular four panel for that could be funny without setting out to be perpetual comedy and carry a enough story to not stagnate and maintain a certain amount of interest.

One of the few finished panels of Eye: Private Eye.

I know there are inherent problems in shoe horning everything into a four-panel format (most jokes end successfully on the third) but I wanted a standard format to use so that I could work on building a decent website, which is another skill I need work on, with decent archiving and a clear simple design.

Then I made my trademark mistake:  I drew the characters, I constructed the framework of a setting, and came to the conclusion that my throwaway idea to just give me something to draw was too good and my artistic talent

will never live up to my expectations.  I have to this day drawn two strips and finished neither of them completely.

Eye is a mutant.  He’s a runt with a squashed beak like mouth and only one eye.  He is sour, grumpy, unkempt, untidy, perpetually hung over, disorganized and penniless.  He makes his living as a private detective with his gentle-giant friend Hammerhead, a fearsome looking shark-headed mutant who wants a kitten and has a childish innocence that means he can’t comprehend why people find him frightening.

It’s set in a near-future urban sprawl where mutants are the mutated-disfigured variety as opposed to the super-model with special powers variety and distrusted and downtrodden accordingly.  This project is again one of those where I have more in my head and in notes form than is on actual physical pages and the disruption of the transfer from brain to page has been largely self defeating.

I sense that I’m now starting to talk about things which are not merely unfinished and incomplete, but actually not started.  Both Eye and Paladin are almost in a planning stage as opposed to anything else.  Having said that, this early planning stage for my earlier work would probably mean I had ten pages already before grinding to a halt when I realised I had no idea where I was going.  I think I’ve probably grumbled about it before, but planning is very important and my inner-8-year-old weeps every time I admit that.

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This is an odd one.  This is a more recent project that started off as a cliché ridden fantasy idea that I was using almost as a thought experiment and culminated in a story that I really want to tell.  I have what I think to be really good ideas for this but have also become convinced that my art is not good enough to tell it properly or do it justice.

This is Paladin, a story about a young goblin who wants to become a knight of the realm dedicated to honour and justice as opposed to a scheming thieving power grabbing violent malcontent like the rest of his species.  The series would see him taken on by a disgraced trainer of knights and through a series of coincidence or destined events would get closer and closer to achieving his goal to the utter dismay of “Lord Smith”, the ruler of the realm currently descending to despotism and tyranny.  The ultimate point of the story would be to explore the idea of power inevitably corrupting and forcing compromise on ideals as Snakral the goblin follows the path that was only recently tread by a young dreaming blacksmith’s apprentice who wanted to become a knight, ending up toppling the previous tyrant-king to become Lord Smith, ruler of the realm.

Snakral the goblin picking mushrooms and dreaming of life as a knight of the realm.

I have a bunch of concept sketches, a load of plans and even a few page outlines, which is a first for my comics.  I also experimented with making it novel-based instead, but that didn’t work and this definitely belongs in comic-format.  I also can’t shake the idea that it might make a decent animated series, but that is so far beyond my means, abilities and work ethic that it’s untrue and borderline delusional.

Taking a few steps back from the project over the last few months, I’ve noticed the elements that I thought were unique are probably not quite so.  The character design of Snakral, the goblin, is somewhere between Dobby the house elf and a young Yoda and the idea of a traditional monster-race being the questing protagonist-hero isn’t a million miles away from Shrek, the ogre with a heart of gold and two too many films.  I still love Snakral as a character.  He moves slightly beyond my usual “He is ____ but incompetent” archetype that I’ve noticed pops up in everything and is instead a determined underdog with hopes, dreams and a modicum of talent mixed with luck.  In essence, I like this project because it has the potential to mix nihilistic predeterminism with pure naïve optimism which could provide an interesting juxtaposition.

I am fully aware that this is a hilarious situation I have got into:  I am talking about a project as if it exists already whereas all I can really show is a couple of sketches, the result of an attempt to learn how to use a tablet in Photoshop, and a half finished splash page.  This is all that exists in any solid substantial consumable form.

Additional Notes:

This is my fourth post on outstanding projects and although it’s all horribly self indulgent, it’s actually been quite interesting for me to write about these things.  When you look at a project with a view to explaining it in something approaching a pitch format, it’s so much easier to pick up on the weaknesses and inadequacies.  Part of that is the lizard brain constantly shouting at you that you’re rubbish and your work takes on your characteristics of rubbish-ness, but part of it is genuinely good self assessment.  I would heartily recommend this to anyone with a languishing project of this nature.

by ·Comments Off on Incomplete Works: The Adventures of Spaceman

Spaceman and the Territorial Space Marine Corps. It's an odd tag-line to have when there are 5 people in the picture. Did not think that one through.

The Adventures of Spaceman was looking promising for a while.  I finished about ten pages in as many days and was delighted with the results.  I’d learnt some lessons from Matt Cubed about black and white comics, and that getting a bit more black in gave it a bit more definition (and if anything, a comic set predominantly in space should give you plenty of opportunity for more black), I was happier with the writing which was at least partially planned, and some of the jokes made me laugh at the time.  There is a very sad reason for why I stopped drawing this one, a reason that to this day haunts me.

My pen ran out of ink.

It is the most pathetic of reasons that if anyone else had uttered those words I would have scoffed and turned away, clear in my mind that the person declaring such a pathetic excuse for halting production on an otherwise promising-to-themselves comic was a moron, a buffoon and several other undesirable things that I did not wish to associate with.  Unfortunately it’s true.  I’d been using a different, thicker, beefier pen and it ran out.  By the time I came to replace it, I just wasn’t in the mood to draw the comic any more, so it languished at the ten-page-mark in the way that so many of my comics seem to.

Spaceman is the story of the last British man alive.  In space.  Simon Paceman lives in a time where nationality as an aspect of identity means very little to anyone with political borders all but disappeared what with the colonisation of space, and symbols like flags are worn merely as novelty historical heirlooms to a distant past.  Simon lives with a family prophecy that his life will never amount to anything, and in the course of trying to prove that wrong, ultimately proves it to be right.

Now this set up ultimately proves problematic.  To have a comic about someone not succeeding in his aims is to have a comic where not much actually happens.  You could have a Wile E Coyote and  Road Runner scenario where no matter how hard he tries, the status quo is restored each week, but I was looking to do something a bit more than that and to hopefully build some form of narrative with the characters.  In short, a Road Runner cartoon would be destroyed by making the characters talk, but in a story where characters talk, having the status quo restored each episode invariably renders the talking moot.  Maybe that doesn’t make sense, but long explanation short:  I wasn’t and am not entirely happy with the set up.

I am tempted to revisit Spaceman, as there were characters I had created but never really introduced.  In fact, only two characters from my sketch of the Territorial Space Marine Corps feature in the comic at all, and one of them is only in it for a grand total of one panel.

Incidentally, Spaceman also features in a game by the marvellous Cathelius Games and a sequel is planned (where we learn from the mistakes made in the first one, because it has its quirks) so in some ways, I suppose I can’t help but come back to S.Paceman and his colleagues at some point in the future.  I actually recall really enjoying scribbling out a few little comics for some of the different characters that you could play as.

The first ten pages or so are included in the rar file below.

The Adventures of Spaceman – rar

Additional Notes:

Spaceman: Prelude by Cathelius can be found here and a sequel is being worked on.  There is artwork for it and everything.  The working title is “The Wrath of Stan”.


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Left to right, slacker genius Doug, reluctant human slayer Kel and ambitious family head Soria.

 

Gloomesbury was a short lived but long-bubbling project about vampires.  Just for historical context, this was before the Twilight-o-pocalypse of Vampires and Barechestwolves and was probably cribbed from a mush of Buffy and Underworld, but more English. 

The comic is about a reluctant vampire, Kel, who has been designated as the “Human Slayer”, a hunter of the clan who does his best to cull humankind and make the chances of vampires surviving from the brink of extinction a little more favourable.  Kel is however very much a human sympathizer, getting his blood from blood donations to the clinic that his sister works at and generally being a little too mild mannered for the darker elements of vampire society. 

This was the second comic that I started working on after the Student Squad and tried using a grayscale palette and experimenting with a slightly different art style, initially attempting to use plenty of cross hatching and as little computer enhancement as possible aside from the text (which is, I am terribly sorry to say, in Comic Sans.  I was young, I didn’t know, I’m sorry). 

There was a lot I wanted to do with this.  I have a couple of pages still in production folders where I started to expand the cast a little more and I have a few sketches and scribbled ideas. 

The main problem I would have with restarting this comic is the aforementioned Twilight craze.  I’m a little tired of vampires showing up all over the place and being the current big thing.  Although the Gloomesbury cast do actually drink blood (except for the vegan vampire drummer in Kel’s little brother’s band), vampires are very much over used. 

There really isn’t much of this one.  All 7 pages of it are included in the archive below. 

Gloomesbury.rar 

Additional Notes: 

  

Maybe it would be fresh and interesting if the cast were zombies instead… 

On a side note, I really like the name “Gloomesbury”.