Welcome back!

Let's kick things off with a nice little update, hm? Pages 311-327 are now available to be read!

It is now February 1st, 2022, and I think that's great. It's pretty cool. Time slips through your goddamn fingers.

The first public-facing build of the walkaround demo will be going up to Patreon here in a few hours. It'll be available for everyone who's a patron, so get in now and see what's up! It's not quite "done", or "polished" but it has a complete throughline and is in a very loose form of early access, where you can pick holes in it all you want. It's also the first of the month, so if you want to join, now's the best time to do so. The tiers are just $1 and $5, so hopefully it's nice and approachable.

When it's "done" - or at least as done as it's going to get - it'll see a full public release, where you can see all the people who graciously let me put their original characters in my demo.

I'd really like feedback on this walkaround, since playable games like that will be a major part of the comic, and I'd like to know in advance where the failure points are in this approach, since it seems good to me, but hey - I am not everyone. So, like, while I'm always open to people telling me where they think my comic falls short, I am especially open to it with regards to this.

With regards to update schedule, I'm still planning on weekly updates, but my arm is very sore in ways I'm not thinking about, and I don't want to push it too hard, so if I fall behind, uh… please be nice to me.

Also, February 1st marks the start of WORLDBRUARY, a world-building prompt month started by my friend mabel, and there may be prompts here and there that I fill out. No promises though - I, as they say, have a lot of irons in the fire.

December 8r8k!

So, as it turns out, I totally didn't quite get enough stuff in order for the end of A1 as I had liked. So December will be a short break for me to get stuff back in order, work with some guest artists for the end of A1, catch up on donator comics and take care of some other stuff that I've had piled onto my plate on account of being in high-demand for being so effortlessly cool and talented.

I was always going to take some month at the end of the year off, either December or January, but I was hoping to have more of the comic out. But drawing is hard, writing is hard, animation is hard, website development is hard, and game development is hard! And I'm doing all of those. And also, FINAL FANTASY 14: ENDWALKER is coming out soon.

So for the rest of the year:

• 11/30: ACT 1, PART 14: "have you heard of... bones"
• Two random days in December: Donator comics.
• Random day in January: EOA1 tech demo.
• The Tuesday after that: ACT 1, PART 15: Redpop

And then it's back to every Tuesday!

These days are not actually random. It's "when they are done".

Anyway, some real talk: you're probably going to be horrified when you hear this, but I've been redrawing all the comic pages the week they go up! It's a miracle I get anything done.

I have a policy of not really touching panels once they get published, but early on, the art in the comic is rough enough that it kind of needed more than just a retouch before going up. This is a well that every webcomic artist falls into, I think. We all know it exists! We all look at the poor saps who fall down the well, and we all laugh and think "I've watched them fall into the well, surely I will not make the same mistake!". And then I leap directly into the well.

Thankfully, I'm almost at the point where I'm out of the well.

This rate of redraws averages out to about ~100 panels a month, ~3.3 panels a day, and ~1200 panels a year, not counting animations and games. I'm sure nobody would be upset if I decided to go from weekly to "when it's ready", but it's a pace that I'm comfortable with, that I enjoy, the week-to-week, the routine, etc. etc.

But it's mostly being spent on redrawing panels week to week, and that's just terrible for getting new things done. And that's what I'm doing with this break! Instead of spending my time redrawing, I'm gonna just work on the things that need working on.

And to go with it, I started a Trello board, and made it public, so you can see what I'm working on at any given moment, if you care about that kind of thing.

In the meantime, I'd highly suggest you check out KITTYQUEST, a comic I have loved since it launched. It's launching an animation on the 5th, and it's consistently pretty great.

[S] Get this over with.

Credits where due: the song is Let's Get This Over With by They Might Be Giants. Also, a lot of alpha troll sprites were generously lent to me by Tumblr user popomerrygamz, who runs a whole blog of sprite edits of a similar high caliber.

GTOW marks a delineation in the comic I'm calling "the first half of ACT 1".

That said, happy Cascade day! It's been 10 years since that bad boy hit the store shelves. Hit those shelves so hard they fell over and scattered other products all over the place.

I'm going to take a break for the next ~2 weeks or so to round up things for the back half of ACT 1. I've kind of fallen behind on other duties while making this section of the comic, so I'll take a page from Homestuck's playbook and take a bit off to get caught up on other obligations.

Thankfully, there's a baked-in return date. 11/11! And then, hopefully back to regular Tuesday updates.