Weenie Towne

A sketch and doodle journal; occasional reblogs

[weenietowne]

What ever happened to your Undertale mercy design on the Fangamer site? I loved that shirt and noticed that it is parallel with the Deltarune chapter 1 shirt and just when I could get it, it gives a 404 page and doesn't appear anywhere

It was an older design and we retired it to make room for newer shirts, that’s all. Sorry you missed it!

[weenietowne]

October 2019 marks the 30th anniversary of the Quest for Glory video game series, so what better time to write a bunch of words about it?

It was a game that I played at just the right time in my life to embed itself into my psyche. I was already a lifelong devotee to the Sierra adventure games at the tender age of 12. I learned to type by guiding Rosella via text parser around the land of Tamir to save her father. I read the King’s Quest Companion until the covers fell off. I subscribed to Sierra On-Line magazine, and was briefly pen pals with Roberta Williams (and once received a phone call, to the surprise of my mother who did not know why an adult woman was calling her 10 year old daughter). It was in the Sierra On-Line magazine that I first noticed an ad for the Quest for Glory Collection. 

I saw the game one day at the mall with my dad, and casually asked him to get it for me. I wasn’t really expecting much, but hey, it might be fun. Previous references to the series had always looked too grown up to interest me, but now I was a pre-teen! I was ready for cool fantasy action!

I started up the first game in the Collection and was instantly hooked by a deeper fantasy world than anything I’d ever played in before. I could click on anything and get a funny description, I could get lost in the forests of Spielburg, and I could daydream about the bigger world that this little game alluded to. 

And the best part? That bigger world was right around the corner in the next game. My hero and I journeyed together from one land to the next, in each game reading about the other far away kingdoms that lay ahead of us in our adventures. We jumped from game to game together while getting stronger and wiser, and his friends and enemies went on our journey with us, living their lives in what felt like anything but a static game world.

Full disclosure: I found these particular pixels very handsome at 12 years old. 

They were the last games that I played with my childhood best friend before we drifted apart. We would huddle around my computer all night, walking my hero into traps and laughing at all the funny death messages (this is where I learned the word strychnine). We copied the games onto her computer so she could do the other character class paths- I always went for mages and paladins, while she was more of a rogue type. Since then, there has been a litany of people that I have tried to suggest them to, but a 30 year old adventure game series is a hard sell for a lot of people. My first boyfriend, a friend or two, and my husband make up the entire list of people who got through the first game at my behest and then never continued. They just can’t quite see what I see in these dated little games...but then again, they only played the first one. The first in a series is rarely the star of the show. I wonder if they saw the puns scattered liberally about, the fairly straightforward fantasy quest, and decided that was probably all that was there.

They never went through getting the Prophecy at the Temple of Sekhmet, a somewhat fourth-wall breaking event that felt like it wasn’t just judging the character in the game, but peeking out to the player and asking who they really wanted to be. Or being beguiled by Ad-Avis, an unsettling event playing on the dissonance between the hero’s happily altered perception and the player’s own knowledge of the terrible trap they are both being led into. They never even walked around the savannah for days without any rations in the inventory only to accidentally stumble upon the Awful Waffle Walker, saviour of hungry heroes across the land. 

If you know the flame dart spell you can toast him before eating him.

They certainly never saw my hero slowly fall in love with Erana as he finds sanctuary in her gardens, or found themselves befriending monstrous women like the Rusalka, and Baba Yaga - ladies who are as charming as they are absolutely willing to kill you. The women of the series are a standout- and not just for the time that the games were made in. They are varied and memorable and fun, sometimes allowed to be vulnerable in a very human way, and never there just to be a checkbox for the hero to rescue or win (ok, I guess there is one woman who is literally a tree that you can revive, but even Julanar is interesting). A friend of mine remarked several years ago that she never liked being a girl while growing up, because there were never any cool girls in tv shows or video games. It had not occurred to me until then that all of my favorite things as a kid were created by women, and I had never felt left out the way that my friend did. While Quest for Glory obviously had to cater to its most visible audience of young men, the hand of Lori Cole is strong at the helm beside her husband’s. 

...which isn’t to say there’s no romancing cute girls. Hey, who can’t enjoy that?

I said earlier that I played it at the precise age for it to imprint on my brain. When I was in eighth grade, and right after the release of the last entry to the series in 1998, I began drawing my first comic series. It starred my hero (who in my game was named Mir) and a companion, a gnome girl based on myself (also named Mir).

Yes, it was completely dreadful. 

I’m still working on it, though. 

The story that I’m writing now is unrecognizable from the goofy gag strips that were so funny to me and my friends, but there is still a character named Erana, and there is still a hero that looks essentially unchanged from the paladin that I traveled around Glorianna with. Anyone looking at it who knew of my love for the series would put the pieces together pretty easily. I finished the first version of it in 2003, at the end of my senior year of high school and immediately started drawing a new version. That one lasted 7 years of working on and off, and I drew 217 pages before I gave up, too frustrated with how the story had rambled on and couldn’t go where I wanted it to. The art got better, though.

I didn’t give up, though. I still loved the characters that I had been carrying around in my head since 1998, and I still wanted to tell the Mirs’ stories in the best way that I could. A few years after I stopped drawing it, I started writing again, determined that if I started drawing it again, I’d have the whole story planned out, at least roughly. That’s where I am now in 2019. I’m not someone who finishes projects quickly (I’m still working on an inktober drawing set from two Octobers ago). I’ve been picking away at this comic for twenty one years.

I won’t say that if it wasn’t for this game, I wouldn’t have made anything- I’m sure that something else would have planted seeds and taken root, eventually flowering into some other fandom passion project that I’d transform into my own. The company I work for was founded by friends who were all brought together by their shared love of Earthbound, and have created incredible things both directly and indirectly inspired by it. But for me, it was Quest for Glory. 

Thank you, Lori and Corey Cole, and all of the other people who worked hard to bring the series to life all those years ago.

[weenietowne]

I've decided to combine my love for cute lapel pins and playing card design history, with a small set of designs based off of some famous face cards!

The "Suicide King", named for the sword going through the head

The "Queen of Hearts", portrayed variously in literature, movies and music

The "One-Eyed Jack", always depicted in profile

I've done quite a bit of playing-card based art over the years (including several decks for Fangamer.com), so I felt like I was ready to bring it into the world of enamel pins!

Please consider backing here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cardlapels/card-characters-enamel-pin-set/description

[weenietowne]

Messing around with clip studio for iPad with a dnd drawing. Couple of us hitched a ride with an angel, which would have been a good selfie if phones were a thing

[weenietowne]

Trying to think of some new things to make for the street fair this winter. Bugs are cool, right?! I think these would look nice drawn with those posca pens. (It's a humble bumble bee and a tarantula hawk)

[weenietowne]

bedtime doodles

[weenietowne]

Not-bedtime reblog

[weenietowne]

bedtime doodles

[weenietowne]

Fun with posca markers

[lauraverdin]

I got to draw a bunch of cute monsters for this official Stardew Valley shirt, available on Fangamer.com!

https://www.fangamer.com/products/stardew-valley-junimo-shirt

[weenietowne]

My justification for why a junimo would be down in the mines, is that SOMEONE’S got to put that stardrop in that treasure chest on the hundredth floor down, right?

[weenietowne]

messing aroooound

[weenietowne]

D&D doodles...

[weenietowne]

I’m a little more chill now (thanks, big pharma) but this comic I drew in 2011 is still close to my heart

eugh though remembering the summer that I drew this D:

[weenietowne]

A gift for @karifry, after she generously gifted me with some cool oil based colored pencils (this was my first time using them, and a little experimental, since the pencils can be used with solvents like oil paint!)

It’s a couple of verdins and a chuparosa plant!

[weenietowne]

Charlie and I have been messing around in Dragon Ball Fighterz and they're my favorites

[weenietowne]

I’ve been feeling some eyestrain lately so I left my glasses off and tried to capture the view of driving up Campbell Road into the foothills at dusk with a gif

[weenietowne]

I’m bummed about Ursula K LeGuin so I guess I drew a very fast Ged and Arha from The Tombs of Atuan. 

There’s so much amazing love pouring out for one of my favorite authors today, it’s a little overwhelming. I hope a lot of people discover her work today. 

[weenietowne]

shamefully self indulgent D&D drawings of my cleric and her sad old man