For the artist: because I'm curious, how do you go about writing this comic? Do you play the game and write down everything that's interesting and build off that? Do you write the story and incorporate whatever event fits the story? Do you play the game, take a couple screenshots, and hope you remember? Also, do you have seperate saves for each clan involved in the story? Or just one for aphidclan and manually write the other clans?
An example on what I mean, Rye and Spiderglade. How were those two created? Are they ocs you thought of while writing? Or were they in game? And if so, they didn't start out in present day aphidclan, so what part of the game were they generated in?
~ sincerely, a first-time clangen comic writer who over thinks things.
Hmm. So Iād say how I go about writing the comic has changed significantly since I started. When I started, Iād very much go by the prompts more than anything, and Iād just use my imagination to fill inbetween the lines of what that would look like for the characters interacting, like Firebeetle pulling burrs out of Goldshineās pelt would mean they would be anxiously fretting over him for sure, following stars fall into a river. Then my imagination started filling in even MORE of the blanks, connecting different prompts together, like Lilacpaw getting the prompts āGoldshine wasnāt there for flower when he needed star.ā And āLilacpaw is worried for Stormkit.ā + āStormkit wishes Sparkkit would play more quietly.ā The moon right before Lilacpaw gets murdered. I started adding dialogue and entire scenes to the comic.
(lmao at first for the longest time I was pissed that I had to start drawing longer and longer scenes because they took up so much more time and energy and spoons than what Iād started out with. I was like āIāve been tricked!! this was supposed to be a low effort zero dialogue only prompts clangen comic!! Iāve been tricked into writing a narrative, goddamn it!! I didnāt ask for MORE WORK like this!!!ā and Iād get all grumbly and petty about it whenever I had to make a fuckin. 8 part moon event lmfao)
That progressed further and further until I ended up with a fuckin. 8 or 10 part moon 20 with truly MASSIVE pages for each part that would take ages to draw, because by that point, the prompts had become not the script itself, but the bullet points of a greater massive narrative, effectively just summarizing something quick n dirty n easily to the audience so I didnāt have to write out a whole ass scene just to communicate āshadepaw has been acting angsty.ā To the audience. Itās like tell not show cheating. Sure, Iām abandoning the rule of quality show not tell entirely by literally telling you what is happening as the narrator, but listen, if that means I have to draw only 1-2 panels instead of 53, by god will I be grateful for it.
But at that point, my view of the prompts had changed. Theyāre not the entire story anymore. Theyāre sparknotes, quick n dirty summary points I can use for a montage to flesh out the characters smaller, day-to-day moments, the little things that would normally get cut for time in a larger scripted higher production project. The larger narrative goes on outside of the prompts. Generally the more narrative and plot you want to add to your clangen comic, the more youāre going to need to stray from the prompts.
Which is why, when I made the reboot, I abandoned the prompts completely. As far as Iām concerned, Aphidclan wonāt be featuring any more prompts anymore. Because I donāt want my story to follow the eternally randomly generated whims of the game perpetually cycling me into an infinite series of waking A, B, and C to stretch in the mornings and D getting fleas again and E getting a runny nose and F was caught touching noses with another cat across the border and G died in a patrol that scraps their entire character arc forever in an unsatisfying way and H has an affair that doesnāt make any sense and is too utterly unethically horrific of a pairing to ever be allowed to see the light of day and J decides to murder B in a way that would literally never happen for those characters personalities and none of the prompts ever really feature The Saint Tines because the Saint Tines doesnāt EXIST in the game and therefore the game will never include TST properlyāI donāt want to tell that story. I want to tell my story, the one I made up in my head.
Every moment is precious time and effort Iām going to be spending the next multiple years of my life toiling away on, I cannot waste that time anymore on things that donāt matter. Literally every scene I add to my script is another 3-5+ months of my very real human life. A year of my life can be measured by 52 Aphidclan updates. If I upload one page per week, thatās 52 pages. Which is not a fuckin lot of pages in comparison to what Iāve got planned. Thatās likeā¦ four scenes. Maybe five. Mortifying! If I want to be done with this webcomic by the time I turn 30, I gotta start being concise and effective with my time. I donāt want to be spending the next 7 years of my life drawing Aphidclan. What the fuck do you mean I could literally have kids and become a parent before Aphidclan gets finished (if I donāt play my cards right)???? What do you mean I could be RAISING A CHILD and STILL DRAWING APHIDCLAN. No fucking thank you!! I have far too many projects lined up for after Aphidclan is finished to be doing that!! If I want to tell my full story before I hit my 30s, that means I donāt give a SHIT about your early morning stretches or your rats in the fresh kill pile, I need a scene of Shadebreak and Gravel having an argument !! I need my drama, my action, my suspense, my horror, my love and my trauma introspection and my sociopolitical metacommentary and ten thousand flashbacks and my darkest hour!! Prompts can only take you so far. So Iāve ditched them completely. Now all I work with is my script, my imagination, and the plot that exists in my head. If they ever do make a reappearance again in the comic, itād probably be something brief and small, specifically to work as shortcuts for scenes I donāt want to spend 15 weeks drawing pages for lmfao. Because that is something the prompts are really good forāa shortcut, a montage, cheating lmao. Webcomics are an eternal war between your creativity, your own human limitations, and the fleeting sands of time.
So anyway, I think Iāve already spoken before on how I keep note of things in-game. I donāt use any prompts from the game anymore so theyāre a little moot, but I just write them down in discord. I write my script in ellipsus, loose script format. Keep screenshots of every sprite, youāll need it. There arenāt any other clans in the Aphidclan webcomic. Or, well, they technically exist in the world, but I will forever say that they are extremely irrelevant, mean nothing, and will never make an appearance ever ever ever ever ever again, because again, I only have so much time before I turn 30 lmfao. They were never even another clangen save anyway, I just repurposed OCs from an older warrior cats oc comic I made from a sims 3 challenge in preschool. TST arent a clan, theyāre a church/religious colony, theyāre entirely made up and they only exist in my head.
When I started my save, I had a fuckton of founders, and I culled them all down to the first 4 we start with in the comic. I think I sent them all to the dark forest for in case i ever wanted to do something interesting with that? But the other founders donāt exist in canon, all except for one. Spiderglade. Spiderglade only exists in the dark forest in my game, and therefore hasā¦utterly zero impact on gameplay. So everything Iāve written for him was made up. Initially I wanted to do something cool and fun with a dark forest cat like Iād seen other clangen comics doing at the time, so I made him this ominous dark forest figure that miiiight have some connection to the clans historrryyyy oooooooo whoooaaaaa intrigueeeee mysteryyyyy horrorrrrr. And now Iāve actually given him a whole ass plot and character arc as an extremely important and central character in the comic, and Iām realizing thatā¦literally all my prior writing decisions for spiderglade when I was first answering asks about him have since become . deeply in need of being retconned? so I think I might retcon literally everything about him from that period lmao. Iām doing something completely different with his character now. Rye was just a regular cat who used to be a rogue, and they had some vaguely ominous-y prompts when they were first starting out in the clan, so I decided to make them from TST, and then everything escalated from there. Thatās about it, the rest of writing is justā¦ā¦ā¦using my imagination to think up scenarios and then I write them down in my script lmao. Pretty basic procedure lol
