Welcome to EveningClan! This is intended to be a comic/writing hybrid series, centering around my ClanGen save, EveningClan, written and illustrated by Robotoiger. Hopefully a flexible schedule will suffice, but I will be trying to update once a month.
My motivation for EveningClan has entirely vanished and I'm officially announcing its discontinuation. The lore became so convoluted that writing chapters in detail or storyboarding comic panels is exhausting to keep track of and I can no longer imagine the scenes I want to portray without this massive workload needing to be put into it.
Do you guys want me to release a summarized version of everything that would have happened in EveningClan anyways?
We had 48 people submit quilt blocks for our pride quilt for this month's event and we've created an awesome spread representing the clangen creator community's pride. As usual if you have a question about who drew a particular square we can probably identify them for ya :3
Here it is everyone! My third draw 6 clangen cats. I hope everyone likes their little guys
First up is Guststar from @everclan! I've been really loving the story so far, love the doomed yuri between Mousemoss and Cougarclover. I can't wait for more cats to join Everclan too, mostly so Guststar isn't alone anymore.
The second cat is Wrenkit from @hopeclan-arise! I just want Wrenkit to be happy. I also just wanna pick Wrenkit up and hug him.
The third cat is Captain Jack/Captainstar from @voyageclan! I like cats, I like pirates, so I love the combination of the two! I was planning on originally drawing Osprey, but Captain Jack won out in the end.
The fourth cat is Shadowstar from @hope-clan-chronicles! I like Shadowstar. I feel sorry that they have to deal with Weedspots though.
The fifth cat is Ryeshade from @doeclan! Gotta love our murderous characters. I like Ryeshade, I do feel bad that she murdered Zarya though. Still one of my favorite cats though.
The final cat is Twigpaw from @eveningclangen! I think Twigpaw is fairly underrated in the Eveningclan cast, so I'm happy to draw him :]
And as a reminder, I'll be returning from my hiatus June 5th!
A fanmade cover for @forestclan-clangen, and why you should read it!
ForestClan is a beautifully written story based on a ClanGen run, flavored wonderfully with additional inspiration from Gemini Home Entertainment. I am not a person who regularly consumes horror media, and still, the unsettling atmosphere is enticingly immersive with each new entry. Every character has such care put into their personalities and actions, the passion from its writer can be felt seeping from every letter.
At this moment, my favorite character is Owlpaw, the cat depicted above. I will admit, at first, I wasn't a fan, because I didn't understand her. She seemed needlessly brash, like she was just saying things to hurt people for no reason. And then there was the conversation with Redstar where exactly this was adressed, and all Owlpaw had in response was, "I don't know." That single line immediately earned all of my sympathy, as small as it may seem. In reality, she is a frightened kid who doesn't understand the world, and is lashing out. And since then, my love for her has been growing with each new update.
With that all said, I will not take up more of the time you could be spending on ForestClan with rambles when it already sells itself so well. I hope you enjoy my fan cover for it, happy reading!
Oh, no – while out delivering Valentines, Cloudcaller’s satchel burst open and all of her love letters flew out! Now they’re scattered all over the place and she needs your help to spread love in the ClanGen creator community this month. Will you help Cloudcaller out by being a Community Cupid?
Hello, folks! This month we're playing BINGO!
The rules are very, very easy. The goal is simply to spread appreciation for your fellow comic makers, story writers, and creators! Select a bingo card of your choosing – any color will do – and complete the tasks on the bingo sheet to earn yourself a bingo!
This event is open to everyone, including those who are in the CCC Discord channel and anybody else on Tumblr who would like to participate.
Select a bingo card
Start completing bingo squares!
Connect 5 squares: vertically, horizontally, or diagonally
Reblog or tag us with your completed bingo sheets (use the tag #ccc event and/or #cccupid)
(You may also use the #ccc event and/or #cccupid hashtags for any fanart you make for the sake of the event)
For completing your first 5-in-a-row bingo, winners will be given a blog shoutout on Tumblr.
Blacking out your board gets you one free sketch of any ClanGen or cat character of yours that you’d like from mod Froggie!
We will not be checking the validity of your bingos. We’re operating on the honor system; cheating at bingo is lame. It is not the main point of this event to win – it’s to spread love in our community!
Despite the Valentine’s-y theme, this is a COMPLETELY PLATONIC event. Please do not send people romantic advances in the name of this event. This event is only to encourage folks to express their artistic appreciation for the creators in our community!
For the @cccdiscord Secret Santa event, I have drawn Shiverstep and Audience of @forestclan-clangen!
Honored to have been able to draw these two, ForestClan was one of the primary inspirations for EveningClan and if you like horror, I encourage you all to check it out because it has a fascinating story and incredible characters.
How do you guys want the story to continue?
Option 1 is to keep writing it, which I do enjoy doing but it's able to burn me out very quickly so updates will be at best a couple of months apart
Option 2 is to move it to a comic format, which I could do faster and I also like drawing but it's not a storytelling medium I'm used to and I'd probably want to restart for stylistic consistency
Again thank you all so much for 100+ followers! I’m super happy that FossilClan has gotten as much support as it had and am stoked to continue working on it.
CAT LIST:
Hedgehogstar, from @eveningclangen
Fawnrise, from @kcsparkclan
Sparrowfall, from @rattleclan-clangen
Bumblechirp & Scraps, from @scrapclangen
Mantisbone, from @splashclangen
Wolfpaw, from @hollowhearth-clangen
Minkmoss, from @dustdevilclan-clangen
Tabbyfoot, from @our-clangen
Rosestar, from @briarclan-gen
I plan to do this again, so don’t worry if your cats weren’t drawn at all! The next moon is also in the works, so expect that soon! See you all soon!
This is more so a question to anyone, as I want some advice with making a Clangen story. (Sorry if this isn't wear to ask)
How do y'all take notes per moon? And how far in advance is the game to the story?
This is the perfect place to ask! Below the cut we've detailed the ways we take our gameplay notes. :)
Mod Froggie 🐸: I'm pretty loosey goosey with my notetaking, but I write down EVERYTHING that happens in a moon.
I write which current moon and season it is at the top, followed by everything in the event tab, what each character is feeling in their profile, and patrol events. The more stuff you give yourself to work with, the easier it is to write your story. I've played almost the entirety of NimbusClan's story and the game is currently at moon 80, so I have everything written out up to then, split into arcs, and those arcs are split into 9 moon chunks. The story is written 3 moons at a time - it makes it easier for me to work on it by breaking it into smaller pieces.
I write an overview of what happens during those 3 moon chunks, not taking any special care for grammar or legibility, as long as I get the overall feeling of the story. Because I also include written portions of story in each of my updates, I'll then actively flesh out these parts into a cohesive, readable story. If you're just doing comics, I recommend making a dialogue script, or a stageplay-type write-out of what your characters are doing and saying!
After I've written everything out, once I'm ready to start drawing my comic pages, I'll go back and highlight (as seen above) the specific interactions I'm going to be drawing. Not everything from a moon gets included! I'll cherrypick the stuff that makes for a decent story.
Sometimes I'll change my mind! I may have written down something in the story overview or chosen a gameplay scene that I decide, once I get down to drawing, doesn't fit nicely or that I could do differently from how I originally planned it. It's okay to switch things up at the last minute! You don't have to stick religiously to your notes.
Additionally, I like to throw my thoughts into brackets/parenthesis if I think of something that'll impact the story while I'm writing down notes.
AND LASTLY, this is very specific to my creative process, but I go through each character and pick out interactions that pertain specifically to them (or would be closely related to them) from every moon and write them down in one big character doc. This allows me to more easily see patterns in their behavior, the cats they spend the most time with, and gives me a better handle on the story from their viewpoint as opposed to trying to corral all of the character's emotions and actions at once. This helps me better flesh out their specific personalities!
Mod Lucky 🍀 :
I also take pretty messy notes! I just use the notes app on my phone, and write down as many notable events as I can
I'll also write some quick dialogue if I think of something, but the more and more I diverge from canon clangen events the less notes I take. I play 24 moons ahead, in chunks I call "arcs", because it helps me plan far enough out without losing interest in characters from the past (holding onto Flicker, Morel, and Ponderosa was so hard when everyone's out here talking about how much they love yarrow/olive and cold/pumpkin). I'm Very conservative with which cats I let in the clan, keeping your population below 3 pages I think is ideal otherwise I start to lose track of cats and have lots of empty background guys. But playing a handful of moons ahead let's me know whether they do enough interesting stuff or attach to a certain clan cat to be worth keeping.
After all this, it's started going into a long masterdoc that organizes each moon into 3 or 4 events, with a handful of backup events I plan for bonusranches!! I hope this very scatterbrained process helps a bit, but truth be told, we're making free cat comics on the internet, and I started ranchclan purely as a way to get myself out of a creative rut by indulging in a childhood hyperfixation - you can do anything you want forever!
This is some advice that I've posted about before, but bulk making your pages (Doing your sketches for 10 pages, then your lineart for all ten, etc) is much more efficient and as someone who has a hard time with change, you only have to get through that one part of the art process you hate (doing all my text) once, and you end up with a sizeable backlog to have a consistent upload schedule - I also find my sketches more fluid, lineart steadier, when I've been doing it consistently for a while vs switching up every single panel. Find out everywhere you want to post! that may be just tumblr, but if you want to do comicfury, tiktok whatever, starting from the beginning is a lot easier than procrastinating uploading afterwards.
I am so so so rambling, but something Froggies talked about before is theme and general direction - Ranchclan was rather directionless when I started, but it's always been about the land and territory, the relationships between characters, and I think has a general theme of growing into yourself and finding who you're meant to be, and that's never a finished product. Ranchclan hosts a lot of directionless characters who find their passion and love, and that's not even getting into Valleyclan, animal domestication, and all the sorta spiritual stuff I want to get into. that is to say... if I wanted to just read a list of "blank did xyz today!" I'd go play my own clangen save ya know? What makes your readers want to engage? What are you showing visually or writing to make us attach and love these characters? The western theme is mostly just the aesthetic, but what sets your cats apart from any other clan? and we have clangens with cannibalism, horror, space aliens, nuclear sparklecats - don't be afraid to really push the boundaries and get wild with it. I'm really interested in the flora and fauna of the world they live in, but are you interested in crafting technology? High politics? Familial dynasties? Enter the world of mods and coding your clangen saves (pppst one of our first ever events was Smashy hosting a clangen save editing 101! the vod exists pinned in the discord somewhere)
Mod Selkie 🦭:
froggie and lucky have already given some great advice, so i'll keep my response just showing how i go from playing to drawing! spoilers for boughclan moon 3 ahead:
while i'm playing i generally write down everything that happens--used to type it out word for word, but this part's a breeze now that they've added copy-paste, haha. i write everything that happens in events, every cat's status, and every patrol event, what kind of patrol it was, who went.
i also note down whether the interactions were positive or negative and by how much, because it helps me find a pattern to positive and negative interactions and helps me track relationships. i also try to note personality changes because it can help me figure out character arcs, but i'm not always paying enough attention to catch them the moon they happen. like froggie, i also put some of my thoughts in parenthesis as i'm playing, but it doesn't happen as frequently!
this next bit is a defunct part of my creative process now that i script things out, but i used to have a separate "condensed" notes document, where i pick and choose which interactions to keep and which to ignore.
this is where i try to craft the narrative from what the game has given me. i find this very useful for finding patterns in relationships and picking out story beats, big events that can be altered to fit the narrative i want to build, and identifying possible character arcs and subplots for each cat that i want to give importance to.
my last and final step before i put pencil to paper, so to speak, is to decide how many scenes i want for each moon, then script them.
in the script, i get much more detailed with each individual scene, and include breaks where i want the speech bubbles to be broken up for long lines of dialogue. sometimes when i'm writing the script it's useful to look at multiple moons' worth of notes to set something up--you might notice that in my notes, the game gave me no "secret meeting", but i wanted to set something up for a future moon. for this reason i find it most fun to play many moons in advance. my boughclan file is on moon 35, and while i haven't played as far ahead as some folks, i don't imagine i'll be scripting boughclan for many more moons than that, so i've nearly played to its end.
some folks only play a moon ahead, and some folks play hundreds of moons ahead! it's up to your preference. like lucky said, you'll want to think about what makes your clangen blog unique, and how your playstyle--whether you play 1 or 100 moons ahead--will influence your story.
I want to state at the beginning that in ClanGen creation, there is no wrong way to take notes. I've had 4 Clans I've taken notes on, including EveningClan, and every one had a different style. 2 of those were beta versions of my current style, and one was never intended to be shown to anyone and therefore had a different aesthetic.
With that said, I have 2 separate note taking apps; Google Docs, and Notes. I used to use Quotev, but that is a fanfiction site and doesn't have a "find and replace" feature, so for convenience, Docs and Notes are the way to go. I used to take notes on mobile but after realizing ClanGen has a copy and paste feature, this is about what my screen looks like when I'm playing:
Now, with the notes, there's a lot to unpack, my step by step process to creating the steps in the first place is to select the numbered list, put any character so the number doesn't vanish by default, press enter, increase the indent, and select the bullet points. It's complicated, but it's what looks good to me.
Every page has a different visual add-on:
Any relationship I deem important, or any notes I want to add myself, are underlined at the top.
The events on the skip page are in italics.
The thoughts are in normal font.
Patrols are in bold.
And then it still doesn't stop, because everything I do is color coded in highlighter!
Red is for death
Pink is for injuries/illness
Green is for a change in role and/or personality/skill
Orange is an encounter with a neighboring Clan/outsider
Purple is an encounter with one of the afterlives
Blue is anything else I think could be interesting to explore
Put that all together, and the notes look something like this:
You may notice that some of these events are not highlighted, and that's because sometimes you change your mind in other steps of development. Something that seemed insignificant at the time may be a detail that makes or breaks a plotline, so keeping it handy is a good idea.
When I'm done in Docs, the notes app is a bit more disorganized. To make a long story short, I use notes to split the events of a single moon into chunks. Something like this:
It may not be very detailed, but it's fantastic as an outline and turns the "write/draw all of this stuff all at once" into "step one, write this part- step two, write this next part." Doesn't seem to carry as much pressure, does it?
There are other miscellaneous steps, but it's an entirely other project on the Notes app that contains every single character and random trivia, which is fun, but not a necessary step in the main project. Also, try to be a bit flexible with your notes, it's your project and you have the right to do things however you like!
I hope these additions were helpful. Just remember, creation is subjective, you do whatever works best for you!
Yay this is finally done! Good job me for actually finishing something for once! I've actually had this done for a few days now, but I kept forgetting to post it.
I was going to write a whole bunch about everyone's comics, but it was taking too long (many days) because I couldn't figure out what to write and how to word things, so I just gave up.
Credits under the cut.
@chasing-faith-and-fate's Mintswan, @tallclan's Bluegale, @nimbusclan's Harekit (and also Alpinekit's there too), @heavensgaze's Moth to Flame, @curlclans-war's Guppyclaw, @eveningclangen's Rimefreckle, @gloomclan's Rattlekit (and also Boulderkit because I couldn't separate the siblings), @circus-clangen's Whiplion, and @rattleclan-clangen's Fernburr.
