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doodlemancyfirst of all,
Iron Company was going to be a comic. then a shoulder injury, combined with the first really disabling flare-up of carpal tunnel syndrome, ruined my entire life in 2014 and for like 18 months i thought i'd never be able to draw regularly again. i can do a lot more now, but comics are just kind of out of my reach. i played with the idea of interactive fiction for a while. goofed with a simple online text adventure maker a bit, where i could add illustrations. but it wasn't quite what i wanted. eventually, i stumbled across ren'py.
i've spent a lot of time (a loooooot of time) thinking about how i want to execute on the visuals. what i am doing here is slightly outside VN convention, i think. if you've played the demo, you've seen the more elaborate sequential sketches, and you've seen me refer to that as "placeholders" and you've seen the other descriptions for visuals i want to draw and haven't yet, and perhaps you have had the thought: she is out of her goddamn mind.
which just to confirm,
yes but maybe not in the way you may be imagining
it is probably inevitable that i'll have to trim back some of my ambitions. i'm in the spaghetti-tossing stage of the visuals. but here is my Grand Vision:
i would definitely refine this a little further-- clean up some of the wonkier bits of anatomy, tidy up the edges of things. but i kind of want the whole game to give the impression of a sketchbook.
as i work and build up more of a consistent idea of what i need, i can also develop other sneaky ways to re-use art i've already drawn. ex. i'm already thinking about how maybe when i reach the more final art stage, i could just do one fountain background and then use it for every scene where you see the fountain, or how if i kept a lot of the wide-shot kinda illustrations in similar perspective, i could re-use the Little Guys i draw for them.
also: these Little Guy sequences are very fun to draw. i don't want to be an animator and at this point, i've found my medium... i don't really want to make comics. but it's a lot of fun to zero in on these scenes, specifically the ones i have a really strong visual for, and make them happen. i'm EXTREMELY pleased with how the "bumping into Bernard in the woods" scene came out.
i certainly have some ambitious ideas and i don't know if i'll be able to pull all of them off. some of this stuff might just be a special treat that demo-players get to see. i worry about letting people down in the future, after they see some of the inevitable hedge-trimming, but my first priority will always be not breaking myself, because i don't get to tell the whole story if i fall apart. continuing to work on chapter 1 will teach me where to put my focus for future chapters and save myself time.
i am in the grocery store. i have acquired a pogo stick from the toy aisle. i am jumping toward the high shelves with the christmas plushie backstock, and even if i slip and fall, i hope to land amongst the bagged cereals. (colossal berry crunch please)
yes.
but in more detail, now that i've updated the VN with some more placeholder visuals and people have seen some of my ambitions for them, i wanna ramble about the visual direction i'm going in.Iron Company was going to be a comic. then a shoulder injury, combined with the first really disabling flare-up of carpal tunnel syndrome, ruined my entire life in 2014 and for like 18 months i thought i'd never be able to draw regularly again. i can do a lot more now, but comics are just kind of out of my reach. i played with the idea of interactive fiction for a while. goofed with a simple online text adventure maker a bit, where i could add illustrations. but it wasn't quite what i wanted. eventually, i stumbled across ren'py.
i've spent a lot of time (a loooooot of time) thinking about how i want to execute on the visuals. what i am doing here is slightly outside VN convention, i think. if you've played the demo, you've seen the more elaborate sequential sketches, and you've seen me refer to that as "placeholders" and you've seen the other descriptions for visuals i want to draw and haven't yet, and perhaps you have had the thought: she is out of her goddamn mind.
which just to confirm,
yes but maybe not in the way you may be imagining
it is probably inevitable that i'll have to trim back some of my ambitions. i'm in the spaghetti-tossing stage of the visuals. but here is my Grand Vision:
- more conversational scenes will mostly be in a more traditional visual novel style, with sprites conversing on a static background and changing expressions when appropriate.
- scenes where i really want to show the action or the body language or just make a big impression will get that extra attention, like the scene where Erika is dancing on top of the fountain. these are the scenes where the sprites will move down into the corner (where they currently all are) so they can still carry the expressions. there's a specific reason i'm not drawing faces on scenes like the fountain or the memory with Kell.
- i will use the two previous bullet points to obscure my artistic weaknesses by sometimes not getting super elaborate with the action scenes. i am sneaky. no one will ever notice this. um don't tell anyone i said this
i would definitely refine this a little further-- clean up some of the wonkier bits of anatomy, tidy up the edges of things. but i kind of want the whole game to give the impression of a sketchbook.
as i work and build up more of a consistent idea of what i need, i can also develop other sneaky ways to re-use art i've already drawn. ex. i'm already thinking about how maybe when i reach the more final art stage, i could just do one fountain background and then use it for every scene where you see the fountain, or how if i kept a lot of the wide-shot kinda illustrations in similar perspective, i could re-use the Little Guys i draw for them.
also: these Little Guy sequences are very fun to draw. i don't want to be an animator and at this point, i've found my medium... i don't really want to make comics. but it's a lot of fun to zero in on these scenes, specifically the ones i have a really strong visual for, and make them happen. i'm EXTREMELY pleased with how the "bumping into Bernard in the woods" scene came out.
i certainly have some ambitious ideas and i don't know if i'll be able to pull all of them off. some of this stuff might just be a special treat that demo-players get to see. i worry about letting people down in the future, after they see some of the inevitable hedge-trimming, but my first priority will always be not breaking myself, because i don't get to tell the whole story if i fall apart. continuing to work on chapter 1 will teach me where to put my focus for future chapters and save myself time.
i am in the grocery store. i have acquired a pogo stick from the toy aisle. i am jumping toward the high shelves with the christmas plushie backstock, and even if i slip and fall, i hope to land amongst the bagged cereals. (colossal berry crunch please)
