I’m sure there would be a specific group of people that would love my original concept. I thought it was cool but just how many other people would agree? Testing my concept on teens proved that it probably wouldn’t find a very large audience. If I wanted to sell my books in LDS book stores, I would need to change my core concept in order to broaden my audience - otherwise publishers wouldn’t be interested in it because retailers wouldn’t be able to sell it.
Pitching to Publishers
I pressed on, developing the concept, incorporating my test notes. I eventually arrived at something that felt good about and I felt ready to pitch it to publishers.Â
My concept entered this intermediate stage that teetered between an all written story and comics. It maintained that feeling of reading a fantasy adventure but the comic panels felt awkward.
Cutting down the rules was a big focus. At this time I had decided to have two sets of rules. There was Quick Play rules shown above and also one page of Advanced rules that added dice rolling at dead ends and comparing the result to a Cast Lots table (shown below). This was my compromise for simplified rules but maintaining some of the complexity and variety that I really wanted.
I struggled for a long time trying to find a way to make the mazes feel like a part of the world that surrounded them. The hiccup was that I wanted the mazes to be complex and challenging. For a while this (above) was the best solution I could come up with, but this method never felt right, which is why that struggle continued. I still really like the look of having the villain overlayed on the maze page.
I sent out my pitch in March 2016. According to the publisher’s website it would take up to six months to hear back, so I waited.... and waited... -ns
I developed Amazing Scriptures for two years, and during that time the book evolved quite a lot. It was constantly in flux as I continually discovered ways to make it better. I wasn’t just writing a story, or drawing a comic, I was also designing a game and working out how the story and game would work together. The process was long and frustrating at times, because I was creating something that had never been done before.
The book went through a few awkward stages - awkward because the book needed time to find the perfect beautiful version of itself. It took a long time for its elements to intertwine together and reach their final form.
Proof of Concept
I knew I had a cool idea, but I wanted to make sure other people thought it was cool too. My goal was to create a Book of Mormon adventure for fans of fantasy role playing games. I knew that ultimately I wanted teens to read my book. Testing my concept with teens would be an important early step, to make sure my concept resinated with my target audience. Spoiler alert: It didn’t!
I knew presentation would be important even for a proof of concept. I didn’t want a poor presentation to distract from what I was really testing. I made a booklet that represented what the finished product might look like.
From the picture above I bet you can figure out the biggest problem with my idea. I don’t think any of my test subjects read the entire rules. Even though they told me they had read the rules, no one followed them while playing the game.
The most successful trial was when I quickly explained the basic aspects of rules verbally and had them ask me questions as they came to something that required a new rule.
I modeled this first version (the proof of concept) after role playing game adventure modules, with a focus on words. This would be among the first changes as I incorporated comics and a focus on visual representation.
Sometimes I wish that we lived in a world where a maze adventure could include a stat system. I love rolling dice and crunching numbers, but that’s the old man inside me talking. Math was a major deterrent during my tests.
I learned a lot from this initial version of the book. Basically by the second version it would grow into a completely different thing...
Along with searching for artistic inspiration I also spent a great deal of effort researching how other artists were drawing the Book of Mormon and its stories.
The Golden Plates by Michael Allred remains the greatest comic adaptation of the Book of Mormon that I’ve ever seen. It’s also the most truthful to the subject material.
iPlates by Stephen Carter & Jett Atwood spin their storytelling in a more silly and exaggerated direction.
Of course then there’s the official Book of Mormon coloring book which came out when Amazing Scriptures was pretty much done, but I did check up on how they had depicted the characters.
Seek and Find Book of Mormon Stories by Jason Pruett helped me simplify my clothing designs. I submitted Amazing Scriptures to Cedar Fort largely because they had published this book and I felt mine lived in a similar category.
The confrontation between Laman and Laban from The Golden Plates vol 1 by Mike Allred. This conflict is a key part of the Amazing Scriptures. In my version it becomes a heated conversation with branching paths.
Sadly, the one thing Amazing Scriptures doesn’t have is a camel climbing a wall. (From Jason Pruett’s Seek and Find book).
The gameplay of Amazing Scriptures has always felt like dungeons from old-school Legend of Zelda games, where you find keys and unlock doors to enter new areas of the dungeon. Video games were definitely an inspiration of the book’s gameplay, but I often found myself wanting to incorporate the feel of tabletop role-playing games as well. To get that feel I gleaned inspiration from D&D and Dungeon Crawl Classics, as well as other classic game books such as Fighting Fantasy.Â
Inspiration for the artwork came from a completely different place. I had three books sitting on my desk while I worked on Amazing Scriptures: Mouse Guard The Black Axe by David Petersen, The Creepy Case Files of Margo Maloo by Drew Weing, and Space Dumplins by Craig Thompson. I turned to these three books often to inform my coloring process. Space Dumplins has this beautiful flat color style with limited textures and Mouse Guard has interesting soft out-of-focus backgrounds. -ns
I know it’s been a while (like a year) since I made a development post, but I'm ready to deliver some exciting news.
I'm happy to announce that the Amazing Scriptures is being published by Cedar Fort!
Way back in September, I was contacted by Cedar Fort who was interested in publishing the Amazing Scriptures. At that point the book was mostly finished. In the months that followed, however, there were many changes they needed me to make- including an additional 16 pages and a new cover! All that work is finally over and the book will be out soon :D
I'm excited to be working with a publisher and I'm glad it's Cedar Fort. They are among the largest LDS book publishers and their team has been amazing to work with. They also have great distributors, which will also make the book available in Canada! I'm super excited for everything Cedar Fort is doing for the success of my not-so-little-anymore maze adventure book.
The Amazing Scriptures will now be a full color 48 page softcover book, with one continuous maze that spans 22 pages!
Best of all: You don't have to wait long. The book will be available on July 10th! That's only a month away. The Amazing Scriptures is all ready available for pre-order on many online stores, including Amazon.com. I'm still compiling a list of places to pre-order but I'll try to send out more details soon.
I know it's been a long wait, but I hope you'll continue to support the book and maybe even pick up a copy next month. There is an amazing adventure just around the corner. Tell all your friends. Especially if they like getting lost in mazes.
Remember this panel from an older post about my process for drawing comics? Here it is all colored! Following is my coloring process...
Here's where we left off in my process for drawing comics. I send a Photoshop file of this line art to someone else for Step 1.
Step 1: Flatting
I have a few people flatting this book for me. The flatting stage is all about separating areas of color and the color that the flatter uses doesn’t really matter. Once I get the file back I’ll drag and drop the proper colors into their place. Having someone else flat pages for me saves me a ton of time and allows me to focus my time on the next few stages.
Step 2: Color Drops
Here I’ve dropped in the base local colors. I use a Creative Cloud Library to store my color swatches. Doing so makes it really quick to pick a color and drop it into the image.
Step 3: Blacks
In normal comics production this step is actually done way back when the comic is being drawn, but for me I like to add these solid black details in the coloring stage. I feel like it goes well with the rest of the rendering I’m doing while I color. Also I like keeping the line art on a different layer than these blacks. This makes it easier to select lines for color holds; like I’ve done for the flash in the center of the panel.
I could have left the coloring at this stage. I love the look of flat colors with deep blacks. But in my quest to make this book exceptional, I decided to give it a little more punch!
Step 4: Shadows and Highlights
Shadows and highlights give the characters and objects in the comic form - or in other words a sense of being three-dimensional objects. A lot of care goes into every step of making this comic, but I really feel like you can start to see it in this step. Maybe that’s because at this point I’m going above and beyond my original intent.
Step 5: Textures
I’m using a few splatter brushes to add in texture here and there. Texture helps bring some variation and interest to the image. This really helps with large areas of one flat color. Once I post a finished maze page you’ll see what I mean. And after the textures are added the panel is complete.
I usually return to my finished pages a few days later and make corrections. After working on each page you get used to seeing them and that makes it harder to notice problems. In writing this blog post I’m actually noticing one thing in this panel that I’ll need to work out. There’s now rendering done on the baddie’s belt pouches. So I’ll be going in and fixing that next.
Thanks for checking out these blog posts! The Amazing Scriptures are coming along. Can’t wait to get it into your hands. -ns
Last week I spent some time trying to get the right feel out of one particular panel. This panel took more finessing than usual and because it demanded such attention I thought it would be a good subject for a blog post.Â
For this panel I wanted it to feel like the world was frozen around Laman (the character in the center) while he contemplated on his situation- one he didn’t much appreciate.
The first step in the coloring process is flatting- separating all the shapes. For this panel I flatted using predetermined local colors. The finished panel will look very different from this!
To make Laman stand out in the center of the panel I knew I would have to make him the most saturated object in the scene, which meant desaturating everything else. Using a cool brown color would also reflect some of the unhappy emotions boiling up inside Laman. His focus is on the items being bagged up. I kept these objects “colorful” so they’d be the next thing the reader sees (after Laman).
Making the foreground characters darker helped push them forward and also helps frame Laman even more. In just two simple changes I got most of the way to what I was seeking for. But I knew I wasn’t there yet, and I knew the feeling needed to be pushed even farther.Â
It’s time to experiment!
Below are the various iterations I went through. As you’ll see it took a lot of experimentation before I got the right “feel” that I was looking for. I should also mention that even though there’s like 20 different versions here, this entire process (of experimenting) only took a few hours.
My first thought was to put some of Laban’s angry emotions into the background. Red for anger, but this didn’t quite cut it.
Black didn’t work either.
Can you see it? There’s a little texture added to the darkness.
Too spooky.
meh.
I actually think this one looks cool, but it really doesn’t communicates what I’m trying to tell the reader. It also feels more like a halo.
Still feels like a halo.
We’re treading into some sort of super natural horror now.
I love doing this sort of thing, but it’s still feeling a little off.
The big problem with these lightning bolts (or even the waving tentacles) is apparent when you take this panel in context with the panel above it. Even though these two panels take place in two different locations, their close proximity on the page means the reader will “see” them at the same time. The expression icons are very graphic in nature and I didn’t want to set a president for the book.
I quickly made a custom brush for this effect. Sometimes I have to work out all the bad ideas to see (and know) they’re bad ideas.
At this point I thought “Maybe what this panel needs is a feeling of silence.” I’d love to completely white out the background to make the scene silent, but since I only have one panel to convey my message, I couldn’t do that, hence the softened whiteness over the background. This didn’t quite feel right either.
“What if I make the previous glow around him white? This could make the immediate area around Laman seem silent.” Instead the white glow felt more like Laman has emitting an holy aura.
In the end simplicity reigns supreme.
So after all that experimentation we’re back to where we started; keeping all the good ideas that worked and working out all the bad ideas that didn’t. I decided to concentrate on making it feel like Laman is thinking, indicating this pause with an ellipsis.
...And then I notice a convenient radial pattern that could provide a little emphasis, in case readers don’t see the ellipsis right away.
And the panel is finished... mostly. I let the panel marinate like this for a couple days and then look at it again to see if I find anything that’s not really working.
After the weekend I came back to this page and made a couple final decisions. I upped the saturation on Laman in the center to punch him just a little more (and also to make him more saturated than the blue objects in the panel. I also changed the large blue object on the left to a brown making it less of a focus. Oh yah, and I finally decided to add in the pattern on the carpet.
I hope you enjoyed this look at my thought process. Amazing Scriptures Book 1: The Missing Map is coming along. I can’t wait to have it finished! -ns
The coloring continues, but yesterday I took the time to make a few corrections to the line art. Sometimes you notice things when you see a page after a couple days. Coming back to color helps give me that fresh look.
There’s a couple more tangents I could point to but they aren’t as glaring as the one I changed. This one is particularly important to change because it’s with the word balloon. Since people have to read the balloon they are sure to be annoyed by the tangent. It was an easy fix too.
I’ve also included the finished coloring for the panel. Just like with tangents, I’ll probably come back and make a few adjustments to the colors... hmm. -ns
The Amazing Scriptures is part comic book, part maze adventure, but did you know that it also gives you the opportunity to choose the direction of the story? In Book 1, you’ll navigate Laman’s conversation with Laban. Will you be true to your father’s commandments, or will you make a dark deal with Laban? What happens next will be up to you. -ns
The first step is transferring my story from the script (or some times straight from my brain) into pictures. This takes the form of beats - all the shots I want to show, representing the key parts of the story. I find that I need to think through me pacing before I can start thinking about how the panels will be laid out on the page. The beats are quick and rough blobs.
Step 2: Layouts
I draw everything digitally which allows me to draw my thumbnails at actual size and not waste a bunch of paper. It also helps a ton in this stage where I select each of my beats and move them around on the page to form the layout. Working digitally means I don’t have to redraw everything multiple times, since thinking through the layouts may take a few tries.
Step 3: Pencils
The very quick thumbnail sketches get drawn over in this step. I start drawing the characters in more detail. The pencils help me decide on angles, perspectives and helps me flesh out the characters.
Step 4: Inks
In this stage I lighten everything I’ve all ready drawn and start on the final line work. This is the easiest part of the process. I’ve previously thought through perspective and made sure the characters are to proportion and all the forms and shapes are correct. While I’m inking I’m really just tracing over the “best” lines that I’ve all ready drawn in the pencil stage.
Step 5: Clean up
I draw the Amazing Scriptures in Clip Studio Paint. When the line art is finished it gets exported and I open it in Photoshop where I add lettering and prepare the image for the coloring process.
I am currently drawing the line art for the entire book. Once all that work is complete I’ll start coloring everything. I've taken this approach so that I can have a black and white version of the book finished quicker. That version will be used for additional play testing while the book gets finished.
During the Kickstarter campaign I was using that platform to post updates on the project’s development, but I am finally making the transition back to this development blog.Â
As you may know, we were unable to make our Kickstarter goal. I’d like to thank everyone that backed the project. We got a ton of support that we are grateful for. Just not enough to meet our original goals for printing the book.Â
What does a failed Kickstarter mean for the future of the Amazing Scriptures?
We won’t be able to print as many copies as we originally hoped, but we have decided to finish the book, and in fact we have ramped up production. I have two more comic pages to draw and the line art for the entire book will be finished. This will allow me to put together a black and white demo version that we’ll be using for more extensive play testing. I’m slated to begin coloring the book in two weeks.Â
I’m very excited for how the Amazing Scriptures Book 1: The Missing Map is shaping up and getting closer to being finished. We’re almost there!
I just launched a Kickstarter project for my book the Amazing Scriptures Book 1: The Missing Map. It's an adventure book full of mazes and comics based on the story from the Book of Mormon where Nephi and his brothers return to Jerusalem to retrieve the Brass Plates. Readers guide Laman through the maze-ridden streets of Jerusalem toward the house of Laban and face challenges using gameplay inspired by D&D, Fighting Fantasy, the Legend of Zelda and Metroid. It's an all-ages book that's safe for your kids and stuffed full of adventure for you too.
Please check it out and consider backing it. Your $22 pledge is a pre-order for a copy of the book. If you want to buy some for your whole family you can save about 10% when you buy three or more.
