I realize there's a lot going on with...(gestures at world), but, if you have a couple of bucks, the village I grew up in just had a really devastating flood. That's after and related to the similarly-devastating fires from last year. The county Community Fund is taking donations. Even if you could spread the word, that'd be appreciated.
The Community Foundation of Lincoln County, NM provides financial assistance and investment services to community organizations and resident
I had. To redraw those crowd scenes completely. After Procreate hiccuped on me. I'm just glad it's done.
Also, I don't know if wrestling is good or not right now. We took a break from it to watch basketball. All I know is that I want, more than anything, to root for TNA, if only they could make their dang entrance music audible. Just, like, one more channel on the mixer, man. Also, I want to root for AEW as well, but, like...man, I've barely been watching and yet I've seen enough Jeff Jarrett for two lifetimes.
Just picked up Procreate, and decided to color an old strip. Doing the painting stuff is really fun. Plus, you know, spending twelve bucks a single time for a piece of software? And then I just have it? I might as well have paid for it with sabre-tooth tiger pelts before sliding down a brontosaurus tail, on my way to get a giant rack of seitan with my family.
I'm vegan, so that part isn't as...it doesn't make as much sense. But still.
It wasn't my intention to propagate the "women be likin' chocolate!" stereotype, but once you get started with "Chocolate Guy makes a Chocolate Dong," this seemed like the natural direction to take the rest of it. For whatever definition of "natural" can be applied to my thought process.
Hey! Want to check out something of mine that's more character-focused than the sort of surrealism presented here, but still contains a decent amount of (non-edible) butts? Well, then you should check out Ports and Plugs! My free NSFW game about a loving, married gay couple and the shenanigans they get up to on a freelance jobs. I think it's pretty fun. Check it out:
Doing IT work at a sex club? Surely nothing untoward could happen here.
First of all, I made a little videogame: Ports and Plugs. Have you played it? If not, you should. Even if you stop before the sexy bits, I think it's a cute little story.
Doing IT work at a sex club? Surely nothing untoward could happen here.
Now that this project is over (and, admittedly, because I have an awkward amount of time before I need to do a task), I thought I'd talk a little bit about the experience of making my first real game and some of the little things I noticed along the way.
I had no idea what would be "the hard part."
And that's not even a play on words about dongers. I first started working on this thing back about a year and a half ago. I really did think that actually writing the game, particularly the programming bit, would be the challenge. Instead? Well, look at this nonsense:
278 unique assets? For someone who, at most, does, like, 15 panels for a comic, that is some nonsense. I'd definitely never done anything at this scale, and it shows. For as much as I enjoy how it turned out, the amount of bespoke screens should have been far, far less. Ah, well. On the bright side...
This was some excellent art practice
It's weird to say, but...I feel like everyone who does cartooning stuff should draw naked people? Even if you don't show it to anyone. The quantity of art I needed to draw helped, but also the fact that a lot of them were poses and angles and scenarios that I'd never done before. As such, I think my art got a lot better by doing this.
In general, a thing I've tried to do a lot with my cartooning is to push for things like camera angles and scene-setting. It's something that a lot of gag strips don't do, but I think can really help. I'm not a draftsman, you know. I'm never going to work for DC or anything. But mood is something that you can do even if you're unsure of yourself in other areas. If you're an artist, don't think you have to wait to be at a pro level before you mix up your camera and lighting work. I pushed myself here even further, and I quite like it.
That being said...
Fuck trees.
I still hate drawing trees. This?
Bane of my existence. The last time I draw trees was this arc from my old strip, Game U:
Which you'll notice has a copyright date of 2009. I managed to put it off for 15 years, but I ended up having to draw trees again anyway, and hating it. Enjoy my next sexy game: "Let's Bone Down Inside This Shipping Container."
Speaking of Art Stuff
This is the largest-scale project I've ever done. By which I mean, this is the thing that, in its released form, has the most stuff in a single release. One of the things that webcomics allows for is for art to gradually evolve. You start off drawing a character, and over the course of drawing them, things get sort of condensed and polished and simplified. In my experience, the character you design is always more detailed than how they end up looking. And that just takes time, which you have in a webcomic because each update is largely self-contained.
You can't do that for a project like this. The character has to be consistent, which is tricky when they naturally evolve as you draw them more. The biggest difference is in the character Carter:
I had to go back and re-draw all his expression poses because the design had changed so much. It's one of those things I never would have thought of. Speaking of things I didn't think of:
It's a Sex Game, You Dingus
So, one of my favorite games is Shenmue. That's a game that strives for verisimilitude. You're on a martial-arts revenge quest, but you also have to, like, go to your job and buy batteries for your flashlight and wait for the bus. I love it, but, you know, it's not for everyone.
I bring this up, because, when I was designing the sex scene...scenes at the end, I really tripped over myself trying to make it more "realistic." Like, I had this complicated branching path thing, and I had it where you only had a certain number of screens before the characters finished, let's say.
It never occurred to me to not do it this way. I'm not, like, a connoisseur of the Boning Game Genre, so I initially designed it to be way more complicated than it needed to be. Trying to make the programming work for the branching choices and for the menu screen (the game engine, Ren'Py, does not make image buttons easy) to do what it needed to do so that only certain choices would display if you'd gotten to certain points in the scene.
I was banging my head against it for hours, when my husband was like (and I'm paraphrasing) "In those kinds of games, don't people like to go back and, like, see the different options."
And yes. That makes total sense. I was making it harder on myself for no reason other than a play toward realism, but for no benefit to the player. It's a videogame. It's fine that it's a videogame. I didn't need to make people wait for the bus. So thank you to my husband for that suggestion. It's the main thing that allowed me to actually finish this dang game.
Wrap-Up
Overall, this was fun to make. It was weird. Outside my comfort zone. Kind of embarrassing, but, eh. A fair number of people seem to be enjoying it, which is nice. Probably won't be a well I go back to, but, for the moment, I'm glad I did something weird. You should do the same! It's fun.
Doing IT work at a sex club? Surely nothing untoward could happen here.
I made a new game! It's a free visual novel, downloadable or playable in browser, about a husband and husband IT and electrical installation team who get hired to do a job at a sex club! Jokes, romance, and amorous shenanigans ensue.
Come for the butts, stay for:
Weirdly wholesome married life bonding!
Fat transmasc representation!
Sick beats (circus and non-circus)!
A malfunctioning yet polite sex robot!
Butts!
It's a short, fun little romp, and I think you'll enjoy it. Give it a try! If you like what you see, you can check out more of my stuff at my website.
If you quite enjoyed it, please consider leaving me a tip at my Ko-Fi:
There was a time, once, when me singing wasn't against the law. To quote @pseudonymjones, "I love (them) so much. I would kill for (them), to this day. And yet, for the moment, (they are) two."
It's just dramatic tension that never resolves. You can just see the banks, with their ghoulish masks and distressingly easy-to-start chainsaws lurking in the background of every episode.
You may have seen a video on the internet recently. As have I!
A comic strip, Vampigeon by Josh Jennings.
Panel 1:
Caption: It’s not all bad, James Somerton fans. Now that you know his formula, you can make an infinite number of his videos using only the power of your imagination
Panel 2:
[A title card, with Stock Footage of cows with color filters and the text "Moo, Britannia by James Somerton."]
Panel 3:
[YouTube Other People's Words Reader James Somerton presents a video.]
James (Encyclopedia Text): Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad cow disease, is an incurable and invariably fatal neurodegenerative disease of cattle. Symptoms include abnormal behavior, trouble walking, and weight loss.
Panel 4:
James (Standard Dialogue): Historians theorize that the first Mad Cow was, big surprise, straight and female. These symptoms, the abnormal behavior in particular, mimic what people with vaginas are like all the time.
Panel 5:
James (Standard Dialogue): I don't acknowledge nonbinary masc people or trans men, and, as such, their silence on the issue of Mad Cow…is deafening.
Panel 6:
James (Standard Dialogue): Once, I was walking down the street at night, when a pack of roving vaginas attacked me.
Panel 7:
James (Standard Dialogue): They brandished Mad Cow Burgers, screaming about I needed to kiss a boy in front of them.
Panel 8:
James (Standard Dialogue): I managed to get into my home, but I could still hear the scraping of their claws against the glass. Hear their sickening howls, bragging about how women don't have problems.
Panel 9:
[beat]
Panel 10:
James (Encyclopedia Text): Currently the only reliable test for Mad Cow is examination of tissues during a necropsy citation needed.
My main deviation from the memetic interpretation of recent Tumblr events is feeling like it's more of a dumbass thing than necessarily malevolent. Not that that changes the outcome!
blakekathryn
tangentwithtanner