Alright, news post time. First up, Eternal September pages 1-18 are now available to be read.

Next, some questions, and some answers for Eternal September.

• How does this relate to Burning Down the House? Well, if it helps, a while I was waffling between it being an intermission and a full-on spinoff. However, some theming and narrative developments has necessitated me keeping track of intermissions, so consider them sort of like Homestuck^2's bonus comics - side stories in the same world, using the same ideas and characters, that may intersect with the main story but probably won't.
• When will this update? Whenever! Obviously, BDTH has primary focus, so these spinoffs and side comics will update... whenever, really.
• There's more? Yeah! There's been a Patreon goal for a while (that is no longer around since Patreon decided it was too good to have features) for an Alternian mythology comic, that's still in the barrel. Doing this kind of side stuff has always been part of the plan.
• How long will it run for? Good question! I doubt Eternal September in specific will run very long - perhaps a decent few hundred. Again - before deciding it would be a spinoff, it was planned to be a (still admittedly rather large) intermission. But that September 1st, 2023 release date for a comic set on September 1st, 1993? Very alluring.

Lastly, the End of Act is almost done - I know I've been banging this drum for a while, but in sincerity, it only gets closer. It's been over a year since the last update, but I haven't stopped working on BDTH. Even on days where I can't draw because of the heat or long COVID or just plain old illness, it's buzzing around in my brain. There's only a few shots left. I don't want to go find the gauges and meters image I've been using, so we'll call it "mostly done". Any day now.

Happy 8/8!

It's my birthday, and the comic's birthday too! Funny how that works out. So let's talk plans for the rest of the year. It's just about time to get things going again, so let's lay out some dates!

Some time this month, come hell or high water: END OF ACT 1. You know it, you love it already. The animation is the last thing that needs to get done.

September 1st: The first update for ETERNAL SEPTEMBER. What's that, you may ask? Well, I don't quite think "spinoff" is the right word. I waffled about on whether it should be a standalone comic or an intermission for a very long time. There will be more details when that drops.

Then, the time between EOA1, ES, and the return of weekly updates will be spent building back a page buffer. For Act 1, I had a page buffer that consisted of the entire act, and that still wasn't enough to cover gamedev work. (Admittedly, this is because I was also redrawing it as I was putting it down.)

September 12th, then, would be the return of weekly updates with ACT 2, tentatively unsubtitled.

September 15th-25th is GBJAM 11. I do this every year, and part of why I want a buffer is so that I can do so GBJAM again without breaking update flow.

I've been climbing this hill for so long and the top is visible now. And I'm gonna get so much road rash when I skate down it and tumble directly into the parking lot.

Thanks for sticking with me, and can you please bring me some gauze and disinfectants.

A quick news post, since I've been neglecting it, and not everyone is going to go look at social media sites… (Especially now that sometimes they just can't, thanks Elon.)

As far as BDTH goes: the walkaround is almost done. It took way, way longer than I had ever anticipated, in part because I had a lot going on, in part because I spent a lot of that time recovering from the novel coronavirus. That shit messes you up.

I'd say it's about 99.99% done - a few conversations need sprite cues, and the whole thing needs a couple of once-overs to catch any stray glaring, game-breaking flaws. But after that, it'll be 100% done and ready to go. In terms of time to play, I'm calling the critical path - all the important stuff for the story - 45 minutes long. There's, of course, a lot more surrounding it, but it's largely me exhausting myself on fluff so that when the comic returns to regular updates, I will want nothing more than to get that rubber all up and against the road. So homoerotically up against the road.

In the meantime, I'm going to plug some stuff, since it's been over a year since the last news post:

• I drew a new splash page for the comic. There's a certain joy in webcomics where the quality of recent art is in immediate contrast with the quality of art at the beginning and I wanted to lean into that really hard.
• Since the last news post, I started working with Deconreconstruction on Vast Error! It's a lot of fun to work with everyone there.
• Friend of the show, KITTYQUEST wrapped up recently! I loved the ending a lot. KQ has been one of the most healing and cathartic post-game comics there is. I feel confident in saying if you like BDTH, you'll love KITTYQUEST.
• And lastly, I made a Cohost page! I really like Cohost, and not just because, in some impossible feat only I could manage, I snagged the name "victoria" on there for my personal account.

See you soon!

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.

[S] Open.

Song is Pop Culture, by Madeon.

You may notice that this is but 40 pages. Act 1 ends at just under 600 pages. Dropping all of these pages at once would be a stupid idea, for three reasons. Server hosting would be just awful, and I doubt a lot of readers would sit through 600 pages at once, and most of all, some of the big animations aren't done yet.

So Act 1 will be released across the rest of the year on a weekly schedule while I wrap up the last animation work for the comic. If my math is right, A1 should finish in December.

This Tuesday, the 17th is when Act 1 will start in earnest. So as they say, "haha it's tuesday, you fat nasty trash". Or, "tuesday again, no problem". Or "wait. its fucking tueaday. god.". Pick your favorite meme from the list and I will see you then.

The website has been updated, in the leadup to ACT 1 RELEASE DATE, that is, August 8th, 2021. If you haven't seen it yet, check out the teaser trailer, that's right here.

Boy, that release date is coming soon, huh? It's actually not that close, it's about 3 weeks away, but hey… that's three weeks of work for me, and then I launch on my birthday! How nice.

Anyway, new things on the site: Search bar, collated adventure logs, advanced settings to toggle GIFs autoplaying and to turn on and off content warnings. All very exciting stuff, you should be excited, because this site upgrade makes it so easy for me to just post comics.

I will see you all on 8/8! ::::D

Have you all been reading the donator comics?

Happy birthday, to J*hn and Jane. In celebration, there's a new bonus story: 4/13/2020. I couldn't come up with a cool name for it, since "alchemy binge" sure isn't a great name, but that is what we're doing here.

Regarding Act 1's progress. It's moving at a nice clip. I just finished moving and I'm settling into things at the new place so it's a little bit slow, but it's far from dead around here, far from finished, and far from easy work animating. I might wind up releasing Act 1 in chunks, since I'm unsure how strong this server is, and I don't want to kill it by uploading it all at once, since it's my pocket that comes out of.