MAY & JUNE UPDATE

Seeing how I’m two months behind, might as well get both done in one go.

May was a mess of a month. I had a lot of personal family obligations I had to help/attend too, so it really cut down on my availability to do much of anything. By the end of the month I looked like Squidward at the end of the episode where he was the manager of the Krusty Krab.

Because I already failed to deliver on a first quarter project, I felt like a failure if I reported back with still nothing to show, so I kept putting off the monthly report until I had something to show. Turns out I wouldn’t get that until the end of June.

Space Animals was the big project I was trying to get done. My interest in the comic was re-ignited when the Starfox remaster was announced so I figured now was the best time to throw it out there while there was new interest in the series.

It was the first comic I’ve made in years, and it’s ultimately an experiment. This is a visual format that I’m hoping is going to allow me to make comics again much faster by cutting down on the number of drawings I have to produce by leveraging my writing skills, and utilizing character portraits like in video games.

After I got all the art assets done, it only took me a week to assemble those 10 pages together. I could probably optimize my process even more. After sharing the story around reddit some more, I haven’t heard any complaints, but the comic hasn’t really made a big splash.

I was really hoping the comic would spark interest into the history of this version of Starfox’s universe, but I guess my story was too subtle and subdued. That’s kinda what I was going for, a story that implied a lot of history between it’s characters by saying as little as possible, while creating this tense yet somber atmosphere between them.

Maybe it was all too low-key for it to draw people’s attention, but at least I can consider the experiment a success. I have a new format where I can make comics again that I can also use to make my gamebooks.

Speaking of which, while it’s not a complete project, I have made significant progress on project Marth. I finished developing the beta build of the game and made a crude physical copy by printing it on physical paper and stapling it all together. It’s 36 pages of pure gameplay and no narrative yet, but I do have the treatment for the story done. Having my senior editor (my mother) review it now to see if the story is good.

That’s been my method when it comes to all my writing. Write up a plot synopsis and have it my mom review it to see if the actual story is good, then write the actual script/book/ whatever, then have both my wife and mother edit it separately. They are much better at grammar and actual writing structure than I am. As you can probably tell from these updates, my natural writing can be a fucking mess at times. 

So besides continuing to play-test project Marth, I’m kinda in a slump about what else to work on. It’s the same kind of creative hang-over that seems to happen every time I finish a project where my motivation craters and I become kinda aimless. Back in May I wanted to make a Mecha-Break video since I got back into the game. While I finished the script I had to put it on hold because of everything else going on.

I also made a script on how I caught the Destiny 2 bug and my experience of it as a new player. I also had to shelve that video for now because I needed to prioritize the completion of Space Animals, and since then I caught the racing bug from Destiny’s Sparrow Racing League which is actually PEAK and no one told me! So right now I’m doing my best to ride that inspiration by working on the F-Zero comic I started at the beginning of the year and dropped. Hopefully that can be the 2nd comic I’ll release this year, and if I can get two comics, the Mecha Game book and at least 1 video, I think I can be satisfied with myself this year.

My productivity should ramp up once my daughter is in summer camp and I finally have availability to do voice recordings and get some of those videos into production.

Also fuck the 4th of July, ya’ll aint got nothing to celebrate!

~Eli the ex-pat.