RPGMaker MV making tiny tiny people

 I’ve been trying to draw pixel people. Using aesprite on my Mac, and Pixaki on my iPad.

First effort is here

RPGMaker MV Wychwolf titles

 Background is a bit too busy really for a title page... but it gives me a structure on which I can build.

RPGMaker MV and Wychwolf

 Over a decade ago I drew a weekly webcomic with Adam called Wychwolf. It was a story about paranormal investigators in West Sussex in war time England, with werewolves, atomic hearts, invisible airships and crypts of pyramid tombs. The strip ran until Adam went to uni, and ran out of enthusiasm and words, making guest appearances in 24Hour Comic day stories.

I've been playing with various game engines and it seemed like the wychwolf world might lend itself to an RPG using RPGMaker MV.

I dug out the first few pages of the wychwolf story. 

Back then I drew the story on paper, scanned it with a flatbed scanner, as greyscale (I think) tidied and coloured the images in photoshop elements and published to a wordpress blog running the comic press theme.

The images were tiny, 750x553px and under 150kb.

I thought I'd see how different the pages might look today with my current way of working, drawing directly on an ipad with pencil in Autodesk Sketchbook.

The linework is almost identical, but the colours are flatter, none of the excessive dodge and burn tool use that it appears I loved back then... and the process is faster? Of course originally I had to work out what to draw based on Adam's scripts, and then alter it to try and squeeze in all the Alan Moore length speech bubbles... but I think it's faster, or I'm faster.

So I'm working on a bunch of backgrounds and characters to drop into RPGMaker MV. The tool itself is almost entirely database driven, no coding needed, the animations and transitions, stats and combat are all built in. I just need to add some visuals and a story...  which I've got.

The interstitial images I can grab from the old comic, and redraw. 

The only tricky bit is going to be the sprite sheets.

But that will be a nice project to work on in front of the fire, there's no rush.

#24HCD 2012 - JOB DONE!

Completed 24 pages in 24 hours,
packed up using pages and exported as a .pdf.
I finished and put it on a shared drive at 9.32am... 2 minutes over the timeline I set, but as I started by walking over to my shed, I didn't really lift a pen till around 9.40, so I count this as a success.

Here's the comic..

www.wychwolf.com/24HCD2012-the_Last_Dragon.pdf

Hope you enjoy it.

#24HCD 2012 Countdown to 24 Hour Comics Day - 1 day to go

Just one day to go till 24HCD. I've been looking at Hellboy short stories, which have the benefit of minimal dialogue, maximum action.... buuut I'm not sure I could do something like that for a whole 24 pages.
I guess I could string 3 or 4 around a central theme, but maybe not.
I also have an idea rattling about for what I planned to be a series of short - single page stories for "the Phoenix" comic - Alan Turing -Maths detective. Where Alan Turing is involved in iconic Scooby-doo plots, using maths to solve the problems.
Realistically I should probably stick with the Wychwolf characters as I've been drawing them for a couple of years.

Countdown to 24 Hour Comics day

24 Hour Comics day starts for me at around 9am on Saturday the 20th October
Last year I succeeded in the challenge to write, draw and publish a 24 page comic in 24 Hours.

24-Hour Comics Day is now in its 22nd year? originally a challenge from Scott McCloud to Steve Bissett, it's now an international event, with comic shops, libraries and schools opening up to support challengers.  It sounds easy, 24 hours to draw a comic, but that 24 hours includes everything, creating the story, pencilling, inking, lettering, colouring layout and printing (or posting to the web), everything.

The 24 hours are continuous, you can rest but the clock doesn't stop.

 The first year I tried I failed dismally and stopped (the "Gaimen variation"), but last year was far better,  I bought in paper, biscuits, coffee, and pens, and cracked on.

This year I'm hoping to do a story related to the Wychwolf webcomic I draw. 

Obviously it isn't in the spirit of the challenge to do any planning before the event, except for the logistics of getting a wad of paper and pens together... Paper is ready, hoping to pick up some pens on a London trip on Wednesday.

Wish me luck!

Webcomix sticker fun

I got some stickers for the bargain price of £5.99 from Staples, which are nearly the right size for the Webcomix Thing DIN-O-SAUR-US passport scheme.

I tried using the template in WORD for Mac, but it was a dismal failure..

This is a rare thing in the world of Mac, usually it just happens, things just work...

So a brief search turned up articles on various fora, but they all seemed to say it's tricky...

Strangely a Google add at the bottom provided the result, a free app from Avery labels, called design pro..

Wychwolf lives

The Laughing Squid hosting is live, the Domain is mapped, the wordpress scripts are installed, and Comic press theme is running...

Now all I have to do is remember how the bloomin' flip it works..

http://www.wychwolf.com/

It's not as simple as blogger, but then it does look after the whole comic...

Sepia seepage

Up to page 8 of the WychWolf pics, lots of lovely sepia and noise.