Captain’s Log N2•30: The Unbearable Weight of Moth

If you look at the project page, you will see that Jump the Shark and Paruvrew is finished. For funsies, I’d like to post a fun two-page-spread from storyboard to draft to final.

And to show how far my process has evolved, here’s the same image side-by-side with a comparable image from Pirate Princess:

The evolution to my process that has happened over the last two books is immense, and worth discussing in and of itself. That’s going to get a separate blog post of its own, which will be linked here. I’m very excited about it. I can’t wait to hold the finished book in my hands. And I’m subtly excited about making more books. Perhaps lots more. Perhaps a book every other month. But perhaps not. Even though every book I release is better than the last, and even the first was good enough that I thought, “man I should have started this years ago,” I don’t think I have the will to make book after book after book. Even though most of my work on video games is inconclusive, I think I have to do it, in between books, to keep my ADHD in check.

Which brings me to February. February is the month of my birth. So February is the month I sit back, look over what happened in the previous year, and try and figure out what I’m going to aim for. It is a month for reflection, and I log out of Twitter to repristinate my thought. And that deserves its own blog post, which I’ll link here after I write it.

But I get grumpy if I’m not progressing some project. So most months, my policy is to pick a project on the first of the month and ride it out to the end of the month. But in February, my policy is to switch whenever I feel like it. Give the ADHD full reign to remove all obstacles to musing. Embrace the chaos.

Towards the middle of last month, I was toying with my perennial RPG engine, and my current thoughts on that deserves a blog post of its own, which will be linked here. Towards the end, I was thinking of working on the Therian Virtual Pet, now renamed Warsprite. But as soon as I got into the month, I lost interest. Now, I’ve got 4, yes, 4, different platformer ideas vying for attention in my head.

And the work on Jump the Shark and Paruvrew and John Michael Jones Gets a Life has got me considering making more comics. Both reviving Re-Tail, reviving Hat Trick, and building out on my system of “game graphics” that can bring back regular Bunny Trail Junction comics. This topic deserves its own post as well, which will be linked here.

So this is a top-level hub for a series of in-depth brainstorms I intend to do over the next week or two. And all of them have the additional caveat of I’m trying to sort out a long term profitable career. In the arts. In the burgeoning age of AI democratization. My success is not urgent to me at the moment. I have a day job which feeds me and covers the bills, and permits me time and energy to put towards my projects. But the job will not last forever.

Anyways, Jump & Paruvrew is done. Get it while it’s hot.

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Captain’s Log mc•61: Animation Programs

Awesome Moments 1 is done. You can see on the project status page.

I finished at the beginning of November. I started working on finishing Awesome Moments in, I think, August? Yeah, the announcement was log m811. August started briskly, with two illustrations, four pages a day. September slowed to about one illustration a day. Then October I was lucky to get two or three a week.

This tracks with my previous observations that I can hang onto a project for about a month before it becomes inefficient. And my resolution to basically keep three or four projects in the air at all times so I can switch each month to a different one. If I had simply not worked on Awesome Moments in September, I might have completed it halfway through October.

Instead I dragged it across the finish line in November and, holy shlamoley, I needed a break. I browsed itch.io for game jams, picked one at random, and joined the first team that asked as an artist. Spent a week using some poor group of programmers and a sound guy as a testbed for theories about animating.

The result is Toasty, and here are my notes on the process.

Basically, last year, I took a shot at making an HD game by hand inking character parts, turning them into vector art in Inkscape, and animating them. At first, it promised to be at least as efficient as pixel art, but as the project dragged on, it grew less and less so.

So I gave up and switched to pixel art for a while, even though the hand-drawn stuff has a distinctive look that is hard to duplicate. But for a game jam, I gave Clipstudio Paint’s animation tools a try:

This was a great success. So I tried it out in a Jump the Shark platformer:

But this introduced some problems. Tweaks were hard to make to already established animations. I missed the resolution independence that vector art offered me. I wondered if I penciled animations in CSP, but “inked and colored” them in Inkscape, making them vector art, the lower quality in line variation would be worth the increased customizability of vector graphics. And also I made the Jump Sprite way bigger than it needed to be.

So I tried this new system for “Toasty”

..and I didn’t hate it. It was deeply hampered by the fact that Inkscape is not an animation tool, and so I had no way of knowing until I had rendered an animation out whether I had gotten it right. But I was able to do things like re-palettize the cutlery, and swap their heads for different animations. And I didn’t hate how the art looked, even though the lack of variable line-width flattened my style a little.

It also did well in the jam, gaining 5th place overall among the 52 entries, and 1st for the art.

So I tried reanimating Jump the Shark using the style from the existing game, but according to the new rules. And the whole while, I kept thinking, “man, I wish this was Anime Studio.”

Anime Studio is an animation tool I used years and years and years ago. More than ten, I think. I made some Sonics with it.

This animation is not great. I’m certainly more skilled now. But the problems with the animation are the fault of my inexperience, not the fault of the tool. The tool is fine. It’s a vector art tool that has four huge advantages over Inkscape:

1. Line width variation is built in and not a pain. (You can do line variation in Inkscape, but it’s weird, unintuitive, glitchy, and laggy).
2. You can just hide a line segment on a shape. In Inkscape, either the entire shape is outlined, or none of it is, forcing me to make multiple copies of a shape if I want gaps in a line. (There is one minor exception to this rule, but it isn’t very useful.)
3. It’s actually an animation tool, meaning you can see if what you’re doing works before rendering it out.
4. And also meaning there are things like bone-based movement and automatic tweening when you want them.

So I said “heck with it,” googled what had become of Anime Studio (it’s now called Moho), and eventually buying a license.

Here’s the idle for Jump the Shark in each of the 3 programs: Clip Studio hand drawn, Inkscape traced over a CSP pencil, and Moho:

Ignore the more pixelated look of the second two animations; that’s an artifact of rendering them at a size more appropriate for the game. As you can see, there’s less line variation in the Inkscape version, but the drawing still has a decent amount of personality, and I was able to redo the feet to make them more consistent with the character design. Moho brings back line width variation, though I keep it light to avoid making more work for myself. The tweens are smoother because I didn’t have to eyeball them. And I was able to tame the bouncing fins a little. I like them, but I went too far in the original animations.

But the biggest deal by far was the time it took me to make these animations. The original was about 2 days of constant work. The Inkscape was 1 day of work. It was actually more laborious than the CSP version, but benefited from that version already existing, and so most of the animation puzzles that come up in making a piece had already been identified and solved.

The Moho version took me a couple hours, maybe. And in half an hour I made a “tired” variant:

So, it looks like I’m going to be employing Moho moving forward.

Now, to use these characters in comics as well as games, I need to export them much bigger than Moho is equipped to handle. But Moho has SVG export. It has kinks, I’m sure — it has to! But we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.

Anyway, I’m making a book with my kid now!

Once the print proof is prepared and ordered, I will probably try working on another game to nail down my Moho workflow; either rejiggering my Jump the Shark platformer, or else another jam where potentially I work solely as the animator. We’ll also burn that bridge when we get to it.

Captain’s Log M8•T0: Ink-Slinging

Awesome Moments has ground almost to a halt. Almost. I can get out an illustration a day most days of the week. I’m only 5 illustrations away from completion, so I’m going to keep pushing forward, but while I’ve debated making a final super push of two or three illustrations a day (these only take me a couple hours to do), I’ve decided no. I’m going to give every picture my full attention, and if I try to force it I’ll be tempted to get sloppy.

The thing that has absorbed my attention this week has been trading cards. I’ve liked cards my whole life. I thought they were fun in the Amber Chronicles. I loved them in Digimon Season 3 (known as Tamers to us Digimon snobs). I didn’t really get into Yugioh or Magic the Gathering, but I wanted to.

Captain’s Log m7•30

I’ve officially begun work on the final illustrations for Awesome Moments 1. If I can maintain a pace of about two illustrations a day, and one on Saturday, I should be done with them by August. Gonna get this book off my chest and move on with my life.

In this scheme, I spend Sunday-Monday resting, and Monday-Tuesday keeping up on the John Michael Jones comic, adding both a draft and a finished page to my set, so that they keep coming out for Mad Mondays.

As things stand, I’m a couple weeks ahead. I’d rather be a month or two ahead, but I’m not going to accomplish that while working on Awesome Moments.

Maybe I’ll build up some additional breathing space in August. Or maybe I’ll use August to create the next chapter of Hat Trick and finally tie up my loose ends.

I say one image on Saturday and not two. That’s because I’ve had some trouble figuring out (since I work the night shift, and each of my shifts covers two days) how to take my day of rest. Should I start it at midnight Sunday?

Well, right now, my plan is midnight Sunday, do a little tinkering with something else. And that something else deserves its own blog post. So I shall go ahead and post.

Captain’s Log m•5•6•1: Embracing

Took my month off. Tried to storyboard a kids’ book. Didn’t work. Did a game jam. Did okay.

Here’s kind of where I’m at.

I decided to roll my game dev back to the gameboy-esque standards. I’ve been slowly rebuilding Prelude to Nightmare using all the knowledge I’ve gained about Godot since I made it. Here’s where it was…

.. and here’s where it is..

A long bit away from where it was, but with numerous improvements. Things I’m doing “right” that were being done in a hacky way before, but I didn’t know.

Quite the whirlwind tour to come back to the beginning. But to my way of thinking, if it took Yacht Club Games a bazillion years to finish all their Shovel Knight promises, and they have way more skill and experience than me, then… 🤷

Time to start biting off smaller bites or something.

Meanwhile, since zero of this process is making something new, my brain has been freed up to consider what I should make. Refactor the kids’ book ideas. That sort of thing. And I keep circling back to John Michael Jones.

Maybe Wren would be better off motivated as a monster hunter/collector than a bounty hunter. Maybe that would fix her story. But I’m already exploring that angle for Princess Pluot. I don’t want the characters to overlap! Maybe I can do an action story for Jump the Shark. But why not do the action story with John Michael instead? Man, I wish there were more stories that had X, or Y. John Michael has these things!

One of the things I was worried about was trying to take the story of a kid getting sucked into a game, and making a game look like the story. For instance, I gave these trees zigzag bark and square moss and flowers that aren’t physically connected to themselves all as ways of signaling that John Michael is in a digital world..

But good old pixel art does that just fine.

Indeed, I originally planned to have the comic be black and white in the real world, and colored in the game, as a nod to Wizard of Oz. But I want to tell the opposite story from Oz. I want kids to enjoy the fantasy of being sucked into a video game, but then also have it feel natural when the characters in the game say, “Ah, but in real life I have friends and steak and wind in my hair.” So the “real” world should have color, and the game should be black and white.

So yesterday I colored John Michael’s first comic, and then made a proper cover for the first arc of the series.

So that’s where I am. Gearing up to release John Michael Jones Fights a Dragon. Simultaneously developing a Hat Trick game. And trying hard to nail it down to just those two things for now.

Captain’s Log m4•q1: Will o’ the WIPs…

Wren Valen draft is stuck. The problem with continuing a story that is over a decade old is that my plans don’t all work anymore. Looks like I may have to redo it from scratch. Sad, because this moment:

..is both the place where the train jumped off the ancient rails, and the thing I am most committed to keeping.

Right. Set it aside. Draft something else. Just keep going until I have one or more actual books to make, right? Sure. Maybe.

Looking back at the last couple months:

I mean, yeah the first one is nicer to look at. It’ll sell better, probably. And it takes no more time to make than something similarly detailed in pixel art.

But a heck of a lot less than something like the second, which also looks nice, will print nice, and can be assembled in a fraction of the time.

More to the point, if I’m making a comic about John Michael and his friends falling into a game world, it works better if the game world look like a game.

Along those lines, while trying to dig myself out of my book plot corner, I’ve been pondering what sort of game I’d like to make if I were making games just for the heck of it, and not as some sort of massive multimedia project.

Go back on the road to 8 Lives Left/Breath of the Gameboy?

Action platformer with Mega Man influences?

Digital Monsters on your phone?

Bring back the RPG/Adventure engine?

Right now I’m sleep depraved. I’m leaning towards a turn based RPG with influences from Link’s Awakening, Mario RPGs, and games nobody’s heard of any more like The Magic Candle. But where this ship goeth, nobody knoweth. Except God. Who may well will that it run aground.

Just wanted to toss my thoughts out there before retiring to ponder.

Planning on being broke

At present I own and use the domains “logicmonkey.media” and “bunny-trail.com.” However, I typically pay for my web service with my tax returns, and well, things are tighter this year than last.

My plan is to definitely renew the “bunny-trail” domain, but not the expensive business hosting plan that lets me use the webcomic theme. This will result in Bunny Trail Junction’s format getting utterly replaced.

As I’m considering the comic possibilities using HTML5/Godot/Itch, this is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean the first pass at Bunny Trail Junction will be primarily available as the paperbacks.

Much as I like having this blog ad-free and at an easy URL, I’m probably going to let it lapse. I believe it will be logicmonkey.wordpress.com after that*, but I’m not certain. People subscribing or following through WordPress’s interface, which is most of you, should still be able to find it just fine.

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*it will not.

Captain’s Log M3•I4 – Meet the New Plan: Same as the Old Plan

So, here’s the quick rundown:

February, I do what I want. It’s my sabbatical from trying to be pragmatic about my projects.

Now, the plan in December and January was simultaneously make an adventure game and plan a comic for the Mad Christian Mondays newsletter. That resulted in this demo:

And the realization that it is a bad idea to plan a release for an adventure game when you don’t already have the story nailed down.

Of course, not having the story nailed down meant not only didn’t I have the adventure game, I didn’t have the comic either. I let the crew know where I was, made noises about focusing on the comic for February, but really committed to tinkering with whatever I felt like, as is my tradition, and hoping the comic would bubble out of it.

So I started throwing a bunch of my characters together in a video-game art compilation, to try and kick something loose.

I tried making a space shooter with Spaz McDragon, since that was the most scaled-back game idea I could come up with. Here was the plan: get Spaz McDragon into a space shooter, release that after a couple of months of dev. Then make a Spaz platformer. Release that after a couple of more months. Make the comic about John Michael Jones getting sucked into a video game, and have his initial area of hanging out be one of the Spaz Platformer level. Thus, bring all the projects together.

I got Spaz animated and loaded into the Adventure/RPG codebase, and got some space shooter mechanics running in a day or two.

Started working out the John Michael Jones story alongside it, and built some forest platformer graphics to stick them both into:

I realized that my dislike for shmups was strong enough that it would be worth it to just go straight to the platformer right away, even if it did take a little longer. So I animated John Michael as a platformer character, in case I could come up with a game idea that overlapped with the comic story.

And that’s where the status quo lay until the end of February.

In the last week of February, I had almost everything I needed for the comic nailed down, when I was inspired by a series of videos to try HD videogame art in Godot one more time. So, I spent three days jerry-rigging a demo of John Michael running and jumping in an HD hand-drawn world.

Thing is.. I’m sold now. I absolutely want my games to be hand-drawn. It’s not even significantly harder to do it this way than pixel art. It’s harder to animate. You can’t tweak things as quickly. But throwing together backdrops is even easier. And I can take advantage of code-based squash and stretch without it looking weird. And my game can have a unique look that immediately stands out.

I’ve spent the first two weeks of March hurriedly figuring out the last bits I need to know about the comic to actually produce it. And actually producing it I am. Expect the first episode next Monday or the Monday after that. Bunny Trail Junction is coming back, albeit (for starters) at a slower pace.

But if I’m going to make a game, what should it be? I have some great ideas, but they are all too big. I need to start small. Get something finished and shipped. I’ve been contemplating that for the last week, as I wrap up the work I need to do for the comic launch.

I figured it out. Meet the new plan: same as the old plan.

Yeah. I’ll just make Prelude To Nightmare a platformer. When it’s done, I’ll have a solid start on the graphics necessary to continue Hat Trick as an (HD) sprite comic, if I so desire.

And the plan after Prelude To Nightmare was to make a game for my wife that layered stealth mechanics on top of Prelude To Nightmares’s mechanics. I see no reason why we can’t assume that second step next.

So, let’s make set the tentative schedule as follows:

Last Week of March/First Week of April: Race to make Prelude to Nightmare a complete game.

Remainder of April: Expand Prelude to Nightmare

May: Playtesting/me working on other projects.

June: Fix and polish Prelude to Nightmare.

July: Launch as a $5 game.

As always, this is less a promise and more a chosen direction. But I think it’s time to put the pedal back down to the floor!

Update

I’m being an idiot. Hat Trick: Prelude to Nightmare in engine would be very nice, and I should add it to the list of potential things to make. But as far as “smallest, best first building blocks” go, making the exact same gameplay with John Michael Jones characters is a far better plan.

Captain’s Log M3•41: Bygone Months

I know I haven’t said much in February. I’ve been working on comic development for the Mad⳩ crew all month, more or less. I’ve been experimenting with how to make the comic dev and the game dev overlap as well, leading the previous blog post, as well as this:

I think I’m close. I think before I wrap up tonight’s shift, I may have an actual product going into production.

But I’m not there yet.

Captain’s Log M1•O1: I dunno

At the start of last week, I got Spaz into the game engine. Everything seems to be going about as swimmingly as it can.

But I promised the Mad⳩ Crew I’d take a look at the comic when my “two-month” game was done. And since Last Legend Zero is done with me pretending it’s in production, when it’s actually still in the tinkering phase, I turned to the comic.

I was recently reminded that Isekai Is My Favorite genre, from Narnia, to Oz, to Digimon. No, I haven’t seen any of the popular anime, That Time I Got Hit By A Truck And Woke Up in a Fantasy World Where Girls Like Me, and I don’t intend to. I found the first two episodes of Sword Art Online sufficiently tiring to repel me from that particular formula. But Portal Fantasy is my jam. Why not have the escapism be actual escapism?

The first night my mother was home, instead of sleeping, I played various old vidya to try and drum up inspiration for dialing back Last Legend. What I got instead was a notion:

A man sees a bunch of people hunched over their phones. Feels his family has spent too much screen time. Decides to go camping. He drags his kid away from some vidya. Kid reluctantly goes along. At the campsite, finds a retro console in the basement or attic of a cabin, or in the woods or something, and gets sucked into a video game world.

It’s not the first time the idea of isekai’ing someone into a retro game world has occurred to me. John Michael Jones was made to go there at one point…

Well, what I have for John Michael and his family at present doesn’t really fit the story idea. But then, I’m not a huge fan of the story I’ve got going for them, either.

So, I’ve begun toying with the idea of taking this idea, and adapting John and his family into it. Fleshing out situations, world settings, and the like. And making concept art to go with it…

I still haven’t got anything solid. I have some notions that, if I keep pushing them, will turn into a setting that might make a good comic strip or storybook.

So now I’m at a sort of crossroads. I can spend February creating Spaz Invaders. I can spend February developing the comic. Both are good to do. Both feed into each other. I am going to do both. The question is which I will do first.

I’m going to put a bit of thought into it today. This week, I’ll be getting my papers in order, though, and February will be a new year.