arachonteur
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Happy new year, y'all.
🕑 Added 2022-01-02 13:04:11 +0000 UTC2022 is gonna be good, I hope. Maybe not on a global, sociopolitical sense. I don't want to have *too* high expectations. But ideally, it'll at least be good for this comic.
I would make this a news post on the main site, but I don't really make a lot of posts on Patreon. The text editor is fucking awful - have I mentioned that? I think I've mentioned it in every single post I've made here. How do you make a text editor that lags this hard. How. I may as well be using Tumblr post+, at least I can write fluidly in that.
There's only two things I really want to talk about here, "things I am going to do" and "things you may want me to do".
Anyway, let's talk about "things I am going to do" first, THE DECEMBER 8R8K!
THINGS DONE:
- Storyboards for the end of ACT 1. I'm working with a friend of mine, to try and bring more clean, professional animation to the comic, and working with others takes time! I don't ever really spend more than an hour or two storyboarding for myself, since a lot of it exists in my head, but working with others means you have to put that down.
- One of two-THREE donator comics.
- A lot of base code for the walkaround engine that I'll be using for the comic.
- Preparations for acts 2 and 3. I can't tell you how many acts there will be, since act division isn't the same as story arcing... at least 4. Provided I don't subdivide these in the future, act 2 will probably be shorter than one, 3 will be the longest by far, and 4 will be the shortest.
- A decent amount of work on future original projects - not that that's relevant to BDTH...
THINGS NOT DONE:
- More stuff for the walkaround tech demo.
- Released walkaround tech demo.
- Two of three donator comics.
- Preparation for returning to weekly updates.
Naturally these next few weeks will see those resolved. I spent a lot of December actually on break! I'd like to think 300 pages in 3 months is a solid accomplishment, laurels enough to rest on for a few weeks. But 2022 being the year of Burning Down the House doesn't actually just happen. I have to work to make that happen!
Now, let's talk "things you may want me to do".
I'd like to have more patrons! Very frank, I know, and not that I don't value my patrons now, but I'd rather just have the point be made and honest. Author commentary feels like a kind of lame selling point, even if I did actually do them as regularly as I should. I knew this at the start though, mostly because I don't want to lock cool stuff behind a paywall. So it's purposefully kind of lame. But purposefully being kind of lame is bad for drawing people in!
While I'm probably not going to do away with it, I'll be posting tech demo progress here, as well as sketches and concept art when I have it. I didn't start actually storyboarding updates until Act 2 so it'll be a bit. So I'm kind of looking for things to do here.
If you have any ideas, let me know. Maybe some kind of art poll or something, like HS2 did in its twilight months? I'm not sure, I'm not like, a marketing manager or anything.
And lastly. Thanks for sticking with me. A lot of MSPFAs have whole teams, but I'm just one guy, trying to fill the shoes of a whole team largely by myself. I'm punching way above my weight class here, and the support means a lot.
Here's a glimpse of the future!
Comments
Victoria Lacroix
oh, i'll definitely have more like that in the future. i've been meaning to write up how animation pages get made since before launch, since a lot of mspfas i followed back in the day would promise a flash page and then suddenly stop, lol. i've just put it off. there's definitely some of that in the pipeline though!
Patrick Westervelt
To me, almost everything I like about Homestuck can be broken down into, "The story", and "How the story is told". Like, I love SBURB as a concept and the way many characters are written and troll society. And I also love the character select screens and pesterlog format and flash animations. So when I see fanventure-type works, I always get very curious about how they handle the latter, especially in a post-flash world. I was really impressed by how closely the character select screens in this replicate flash despite just using JS and CSS, as far as I can tell. I'd love to see how the videos are made, and what goes into keeping segments like STRIF---E! looking and behaving so consistently with the flash games despite running on different technology. Basically, I'm saying I'd love to see more of the nerd shit. I don't even really necessarily believe that would be such a draw for the majority of the people reading the comic, but personally I'd consider bumping up my pledge to the $5 tier if the Behind the Scenes type content was expanded to include the full creative process, beyond the story and assets.
