Its hard to say because most of the other devs i love are designer/artist who i might have a hard time working with, i would love to work with Dan Paladin but then i wouldnt be able to do the art, i would love to work again with Jon Blow but then id probably be cut out of design... its a hard thing to setup.

one thing id rather do is exchange IPs with another dev so we can each make our own interpretations of each others game in our styles, that could turn out quite awesome.. i could call it something like INDIE VS!

I didnt read the whole thing, but i of course agree with the idea that ideas have no worth till they are executed.

But to say brainstorming isnt a crucial part of game design is totally wrong. That is usually where the foundation of any video game comes from.

My process might be very different than others due to the fact that i cant easily prototype ideas so i can have a very clear view into if an idea is worth putting a lot of time into. But im able to design around this by brainstorming stuff like theme, loose game structure, basic resources, risk reward, over arching difficulty, mechanic introduction and many more things, on paper before any code is even written. The key element to this is that my ideas on paper are left open to change with the game as the actual game gets designed.

The ideas are a basic foundation that i work on when i start a game, but i let the what works and what doesnt work guide the games design.

i designed roughly 70% The Binding of Isaac on paper long before any code started, i had a very clear idea how everything would turn out, what would and wouldn't work and why.. not all of my games are handled like this and im probably playing a bit of a devils advocate here, but you'd be surprised how much game design can go into a brain storm session. But again i may have been forced to think about this a lot more than others because i cant actually prototype my ideas and the core of a lot of my games design are very rich in theme and theme and flavor in terms of design is something thats a lot easier to do on paper.

I drew an initial template, and the art folks were invited to continue in that style, adding new animation frames, characters, etc. All very loosely, without a lot of parameters beyond that. Eyes5 did the Jack, myluckyseven did a Rose frame. There should be more to come.

This was originally going to be a Flash project, but I cancelled it.

Everything happening now, and over the next bunch of pages, would have taken place in a pretty energetic, and much more sophisticated than usual strife animation. Kind of like "strife version 2", for the second disc. I planned this idea months ago, not really thinking much of the effort and time it would eventually require to complete. This is what I usually do, blithely make such ambitious plans, pay the price later, but fight through it with a major grind and honor the original vision.

This was a little different though. Not only was this meant to be a much more elaborate type of animation by my own stakes-raising declaration, with more frames-intensive visuals like a typical 2D fighter, but on top of that, the rate of output had been slowing, and the story flow was already kind of logjamming.

So I had to make a decision. I could either apply what I now estimate would have been two or three solid weeks of serious effort to make this one pretty cool animation, and watch several 100K people sink into a state of despair over the prolonged suspension in content only to have the story advance not particularly far through a totally radical battle scene, or I could scrap the whole plan and figure something else out. The latter is what you're seeing.

Sometimes these adjustments have to be made. I've revised plans before, and had some cool ideas I've scrapped. I was going to include another round in the Dave vs. Bro battle where they used their Sylladexes to wage a hashrap battle (which is why I went to the trouble of making Dave collect all that dangerous shit in his kitchen before climbing to the roof). But I axed that because the battle was already taking too much time to produce and bottlenecking plot advancement. That idea was pretty easily phased out. This is different now, because revising these plans meant I had to change the way a large chunk of the story would be delivered, because a lot of story components were all tangled up in my plans for that animation. So I had to do a lot of rethinking, and much of the solution is what you're seeing now, which is having the scratched disc interfere with the flow of the story, and Scratch taking over narration duties at an accelerated pace while he fixes the disc in time for the end of act. This is in part my way of committing not to doing anymore flash stuff until the EOA, which itself is going to be a very laborious thing and will take a long time to finish.

This is all fine. I don't mind turning my plans upside down sometimes, since it can lead to creative opportunities for handling this stuff. The disc errors, Scratch hijacking the site design while narrating, all this strikes me as in keeping with the spirit of the story and the flexible format. Keeping the story moving is important, but it's not the sole consideration. MSPA for me is about working with loads of fun ideas, both for the story itself and the way it's told. Very often that consideration is at odds with pacing. I do what I can to balance both.

The biggest challenge in this respect by far has been Flash. I'm quite ambivalent on its role in Homestuck. On one hand, it completely changes the way the story is read and perceived, for the better I think. It brings a lot of the most important parts of the story to life, makes for significant dramatic impact when needed, and goes a long way in making this difficult to classify as a medium. One the other hand, it magnifies the production complexity exponentially, and I'm not just talking about the effort the animations require. It affects everything about my approach to the story. Including the whole decision making process, and not in a particularly good way, at least not from my perspective.

The biggest way it affects the process is how it stretches the story out. If I'd gone through with the axed strife animation, that would be an obvious example, pausing the story a couple weeks to make some people fight. But the delaying effects can be more subtle than that. I'll have in mind a certain event in the story which I think should be handled through Flash. I'll know it's coming up, but I might not be ready to launch into that kind of work for whatever reason. Maybe it's too soon on the heels of the last one or whatever. So I'll work on more static panels, because there is never a shortage of plot threads to address or details to develop or funny conversations to write or new fun ideas to put out there. And that's fine really, since I feel like it's all good stuff, but it definitely makes for the long road. I'm quite sure Homestuck would be finished by now if I'd never used flash at all.

There are other weird ways it factors in, like certain expectations it creates. Once it gets in the readers' heads that it's a recurring device for the story, they start to look out for it and expect it in certain situations, compare static content with flash, consider how awesome some static panels would have been if done in flash or how awesome situation X will be if animated with song Y. The potential for disappointment looms constantly with increased expectations. None of this is particularly bad, but if you're the guy responsible for putting together this story, you tend to be keenly aware of it, and it factors into the big puzzle of managing it all. And a big part of that puzzle has been answering the question "to flash or not to flash?"

I've said before, the deeper into this I get, the less I feel like a writer or artist, and more I'm like a producer, managing story decisions weighed carefully against cost of execution. And cost can mean a lot of things. Effort needed, organizational complexity (usually most present in interactive pages), time delay or obstruction to story advancement, stuff like that. This kind of thing doesn't factor in if you're writing something more conventional, like a book. You write in exactly what serves the story, as you envision it. It may sound crazy that's not what I'm doing, but it really can't be anymore, not with these high octane animations in the mix as part of the expected delivery. I have to think like a producer to make that work. To understand what that means, here's an anecdote about Indiana Jones, which might not be quite true but whatever, it's just something I'm vaguely remembering. When Spielberg was going over the script with somebody, it called for a pit full of lions, and he said "whoa! too expensive! let's go with snakes." So you got Indy afraid of snakes instead of lions, because it turns out you can buy crazy loads of snakes for bargain bux.

It would be really reasonable for him to be afraid of lions though. They are huge and hungry and fucking terrifying. Have you SEEN a lion??? Lions would be my quirky phobia if I was a rugged dude with a whip and longing for treasure.




Lions.

(roar)

Why did it have to be...

(roar)

Lions. :(

I don't know. I hardly ever read more than half way down the first page of questions. Too many, too repetitive, etc.

But through various channels, I detect certain flavors of reaction, ranging from disappointment to frustration to something faintly resembling outrage, not just at the lack of an incendiary production to mark year 2, but also the flagging rate of output in recent weeks.

These reactions are far from universal, but they exist, and to address them I think an education on why MSPA exists at all is in order. If you see a creator who begins to languish in production of what presumably accounts for his day job, the impression may be that he is falling down on the job and failing to live up to his professional commitment. So maybe this is the source of indignation, re: entitlement, that some may feel when my output falters. The problem is, MSPA is not a day job for me. It is an all consuming lifestyle. Hence, the mirage that is the apparent ease of output for what is at times ludicrous volumes of material is highly sensitive to even slight perturbations in my life situation.

Let me put it this way. You may work a full time job. It may be that something happens in your life that makes your job more difficult, because you are preoccupied. Your work may suffer to some extent, but you can still approximately match what's expected of you, because there is a partition between your job and your home life. You may nevertheless feel your full time job seems to dominate your existence, saps your energy, and leaves your weekend respites feeling all too short. This is not an experience I share, because MSPA is not a full time job. If you have such a job, then I would have to RADICALLY REDUCE my workload to match your level of day to day preoccupation.

The actual quantities involved have always been nebulous and I never made a point of keeping track, but 12 hours per day seems like a pretty reasonable average, since that is just shy of all waking hours. Time spent writing, drawing, animating, or just spacing out at my monitor while contemplating all the moving parts. This is what I did every day, including weekends and holidays, for two years, and to some extent another year prior to that with Problem Sleuth. Only a few weekends were missed due to conventions, and there was a single week off immediately following the infamous "robo smooch", and that's it. (Most of that week was spent wondering why the hell I wasn't updating...) There are other gaps in the archive, spanning days or a week, when I was animating. Those spans involved the usual work schedule, while simply omitting sleep!

Not only is this an unreasonable workload to expect of anyone, it's practically impossible to pull it off. Maybe you can expect some committed guy out there to really buckle down and duplicate that effort for a month or two. But years? Too much can crop up in the white noise of normal life to destabilize it. Momentum is absolutely crucial for maintaining that kind of pace. I find that if I only do an hour of work in a day, I get ten minutes of work done. If I do 12 hours of work, I seem to get 24 hours of work done. This is especially true of animation. Such projects notoriously take a very long time. I feel like because of the crazy head of steam I've built up from years of nonstop effort, I can knock out in days something that might take another animator a week. Or in a week what might take a month. Without that momentum, it's not possible. Starting up Flash cold is excruciating. Getting your head back into the stride of a story wastes energy you wouldn't use if you never broke stride. Without the momentum, the pace reverts to ordinary. Getting distracted by life destroys the momentum.

I've been pretty zealous about deflecting the distractions, even when I move, as I often do. A notable example was last year when I came back from the Emerald City con in Seattle, and found my apartment flooded. The con was already enough of a time sink, so I didn't have much of an appetite for going into personal crisis mode. I just kind of shrugged, picked my computer off the lone, miraculously dry part of the floor, dropped it in a temporary residence, and kept drawing. I think the flood mess occupied about a day of my attention, whereas something like that could easily take up weeks of your time and energy if you're living that "normal life". You know how it is, you come home and find water up to your ankles and go aw fuck, what's ruined, what needs replacing, gotta call whoever and deal with the fuckin landlord about stuff and auuuugh. I just didn't bother with any of that, because it just didn't seem to matter, and I preferred to keep working and not give a crap about all my soggy bullshit. And in retrospect, I guess it really didn't matter.

All of my moves have been similarly characterized by the unceremonious transportation of a computer and a few boxes to a new room, in which I'd continue working as if no change took place, with no service paid to the life that would be lived there, except as a workspace. I moved again recently, prompted by decidedly less dramatic and less soggy reasons than after Emerald City. This time, for whatever reason, I did it differently. I moved the normal way, the way I imagine normal people doing when I close my eyes, whereby more than a car trunk full of utilitarian belongings are imported into the household, placed on the floor, and never unpacked until the next moving day. I am not necessarily PROHIBITIVELY busy, but like I said above, any dent in the momentum, whether its a few trips to Home Depot or Target here and there or somehow waking up to discover I'd absconded from a shelter with two particularly energetic young cats, is something that precludes a pace of output that is insane and often bordering on miraculous.

What I'm trying to convey here is this isn't necessarily any sort of break, or a grand announcement of a big slowdown for MSPA. I'm trying to give you a sense of the reality which made MSPA heretofore possible, and that if for a period of time I descend from an altitude far exceeding the hours of a full time job, into "merely" those of a full time job, IT DOESN'T ACTUALLY COUNT AS A BREAK! And certainly not as any sort of violation in a pact with the readership. Different from what you're used to? Sure. But you should never find yourself in a position where you come to expect, let alone demand, that degree of effort from anyone, even me. If my output "sputters" from 10 pages a day to 1 or 2 or 3, IDEALLY (re: unrealistically) this should not even cause you to voice an internal observation on the matter! And if one is voiced, instead of "oops, looks like Andrew's slipping," it should be "oops, looks like Andrew's being a regular dude for a while."

Not that detecting a pace change is some terrible wrongdoing, since clearly I've done everything in my power to establish these absurd precedents, and people have naturally associated this with The Brand. I'd just like to suggest it would be beneficial to the reader to disentangle enjoyment of the content from the torrid pace its been commonly delivered. Who can say how fast or slow it'll come in year three? Would my assurances even be reliable? Maybe it'll stay at the current pace for a good long while. Maybe it'll soon hasten back to something more typical. Maybe it'll come back FASTER THAN EVER. Who cares??? Do you really NEED this site to be the fastest comic on the block to enjoy it? Are you prepared to contend with the backlash to your psyche that is risked by so fervently relishing that particular property of the comic? What if it's taken away? Don't go boasting to your neighbors that your slave can pick cotton ten times faster than theirs. It's unbecoming. Just enjoy the fluffy yield of his furious hands, while you wait and pray for Abe Lincoln to gently stroke his beard and relieve you of your bigotry.

http://banov.blogspot.com/p/donate.html

YES

Multiple sources. I used to use http://opsound.org all the time, though that's less common now as I ran it dry. I've used http://freemusicarchive.org a couple of times, perhaps most notably finding Covox's music for madnessMADNESSmadness there. But my absolute favourite, the one I use nigh on all the time now, is http://www.soundclick.com/default.cfm. You need to register (for free) to download music but it is very, very worth it. Huge archive, quality music, good clear terms of use for each piece - http://www.soundclick.com/business/license_list.cfm (change Commercial License dropdown to Creative Commons) is where this all is.

Added to other people's, I will rarely compose a game's music myself with FL Studio 9. Three examples of this would be Corners Kill, EverScrollingHue and Atmos Quake Remake.

Well, if you have to force a punchline, then the punchline shouldn't even exist, should it? The whole comic shouldn't exist. By extension, there are entire webcomics out there that should not exist. (Won't say which ones tho! hehehehehehehehehehe.)

But really, one problem with normal comics I think is when you have pages chock full of panels, sometimes a lot of those panels just get glazed over by the reader as background wallpaper, even though they may be very attractive if examined, and a great deal of care was put into it by the artist. It's sort of a shame.

With each panel given focus, they demand attention and can have more power individually, and create more surprising statements as navigated through. This is true even if one of my panels is literally just me scribbling bullshit all over it.

And the real HAYMAKER of this format is being able to deliver any quantity of text below the image I want. Anywhere from 0 to 100,000 characters. I can fit entire conversations in one panel which would require HUNDREDS of normal comic panels to convey gracefully. I always found dialogue-dense comics a bit offputting, wherein all the dialogue is stuffed into a lot of ponderous bubbles crowding out the art. With this format, this is not an issue at all. Large volumes of text may coexist with the art innocuously, as if you are reading a true comic/novel hybrid.

Oh yeah, + animation's cool too I guess.

If I want an outcome to be less guessable then I distribute the foreshadowed data more carefully and cryptically. Practically nobody ever guesses stuff I seriously don't want them to guess.

Other times I leave more obvious bread crumbs to let certain outcomes be more guessable to the public. With the whole Kanpire thing I think I was pretty much beating people over the head with foreshadowed elements, including a brazen link to a SBaHJ comic in which Jeff appeared as a vampire directly below the scene of her demise. Hence her resurrection could safely be conducted to a chorus of NO SHIT!s with a few smug CALLED IT!s chiming in for backup, oh and also some HELL YEAH VAMPNAYA TIME!s working their way in there. This is not to say the outcome was a lock, because there is always the possibility for red herrings, and enough of those have been established so that you can never feel completely safe with a prediction. That is their primary value. Seriously, it isn't just messing with people. Making a story unpredictable has a lot to do with showing you are capable of doing practically anything at any time. Sometimes you bluff, and sometimes you play it straight. It's a little like a poker game. If you do too much of one or the other, people can read you easily. Even the silly self insert stuff has benefits in this regard. Predicting what's to come in the story is no different from putting yourself in the head of the author. If the author paints a portrait of himself as kind of a loose canon, either through a volatile narrative, or in an absurdly literal way as I do with the AH nonsense, that will be the consequence.

Part of the fun of a story is its unpredictability, and this one has had plenty of it so far I think. Unpredictability is a significant basis for suspense, and I'm sure has other benefits we could examine. But I think there is also enjoyment value in occasional predictability, or rather, guessability. Setting up some obvious clues, and running with them to their logical conclusion. It's like throwing the reader a bone, particularly those who may be prone to feeling a little overwhelmed by getting perpetually outfoxed by the narrative. Another example of that was Jade's penpal letter. I designed it so that the clues would scream GRANDPA GRANDPA GRANDPA, and of course that's what most people were guessing. And the guess was very much on the right track. But that doesn't mean it was safe from another twist. It was her grandson, which is an outcome still compatible with the original clues, in a way. And while managing to be surprising, and not particularly guessable. So in that sense I guess that development had the best of both worlds. Letting people pick up on some more obvious clues for a change, and still delivering a surprise.

How guessable something is also relates to how close to the event you get. Prior to Eridan's entrance into the room, and even during, the deaths were completely unguessable. After Feferi's death, Kanaya's becomes considerably more so, but still quite uncertain. After her death, all bets are off. Not only do all deaths thereafter become guessable, but in some cases, "predictable". That's because it was the line between a series of shocking events, and the establishment of an actual story pattern. The new pattern serves a purpose, as a sort of announcement that the story is shifting gears, that we're drifting into these mock-survival horror, mock-crime drama segments, driven by suspense more than usual. The suspense has more authority because of all the collateral of unpredictability built up over time, as well as all the typical stuff that helps like long term characterization. But now that the pattern is out in the open, following through with more deaths no longer qualifies as unpredictability. Just the opposite, it would now be playing into expectations, which as I said, can be important too. This gear we've switched to is the new normal, and any unpredictability to arise thereafter will necessarily be a departure from whatever current patterns would indicate.

This scene was essential. It brought closure to Rufio's arc, who was clearly the third most important character in Homestuck. He died a tragic figure, and the final embrace between us pushed all the right literary buttons. I hope you aspiring storytellers are taking notes.