Wanting to work on a comic again is all well and good, but first you need an idea. Fortunately I always have plenty boiling around in my brain. I’ve always wanted to do a comic with a sort of Captain N style to it, with a protagonist traveling through video game worlds facing different sorts of game-style monsters. I could never really come up with an effective universe, however. Or so I thought.

A few months ago Machinae Supremacy’s song Player One gave me an idea for a story. The original plan was to try and write it out in prose form, but that never, ever works out for me. I love writing things like dialogue well enough, but I inevitably think too damn much about descriptions and word usage that I second guess myself every other word. I’m thinking too hard about making good writing that I never really get to focus on the story as much as I’d like. It’s no fun. This is less of an issue when writing a comic, and thus makes a perfect candidate for several reasons I’ll get to in a bit.

The general idea of the game will be players trapped in a virtual reality video game system. Not a single world, but a collection of worlds. I originally entitled it Player One, after the song it would be inspired by, but realized quickly that it would be too similar to the novel Ready Player One. In fact, the entire idea may be seen as a rip-off of other ideas such as Ready Player One, Nonplayer and Snow Crash. The worst part? When I came up with this idea I hadn’t even read Ready Player One or heard of Nonplayer yet. I still haven’t read Nonplayer, so I don’t even know what it’s about.

This has caused some hesitation in me. I don’t want to look like someone biting off of someone else’s idea. Then I remember that both Magic Knight Rayearth and Fushigi Yûgi are both stories about Japanese school girls that get warped to some fantasy realm, yet manage to differentiate themselves through the actual story. So yes, I’m writing a story about a bunch of nerds in a Virtual Reality game universe, but the story I’m telling is different than Neal Stephenson or Earnest Cline (and I’m hoping different from Nate Simpson’s story).

So with that out of the way, let’s get to the art. Now, there’s another reason I chose this Player One idea, which I am currently referring to Hero One. I wanted to use a more simple art style, one that can look good while taking less time to complete. When I was in high school I used a program called RPG Toolkit, which is looking way different than it had back in 2000. I developed a sort of concept art style that I wanted to reflect what you’d see in game. As it is very reminiscent of 1990’s sprites, I decided that would be the direction I’d go this time around.

What happens when Canon refuses to provide Windows 7 drivers for their scanners.

These were the first designs I made of any of the comic’s characters. In particular, this is our hero, Eddie. Making him left-handed in the first sketch was unintentional, but I realized that would make a nice homage to The Legend of Zelda. In the upper right of that paper you can see that I was also working on certain styles of grit teeth. One style in particular looks like plus signs (+) in his mouth. This is very similar to how the original Donkey Kong teeth were drawn.

Source

Unfortunately I’ve yet to imitate this style successfully, so I may abandon that idea altogether.

The initial sketches allowed me to sort of refine how it is I wanted to draw the character. The hair, the hands, legs, it gave me a good idea of where to start. So I then went back into Photoshop and started experimenting.

I decided to start taking notes on brushes I was trying, as well as how far zoomed in I was drawing the art.

The above image is 25% “original” size. It is not uncommon for me to make my digital artwork absolutely huge and then shrink it down to a more web friendly state. All of my GameLandEtc. strips started as twice the size as when I published them. So this was partially an experiment to see how all the art would look when shrunk down. This is all too small, even though from a distance you can’t see the small imperfections. I must admit, I kind of like that about it. However, it’s not worth the time investment considering how little of the screen is taken up by the artwork.

This time the image is at 50% original size. The first drawing was done in a sort of sketch-style with I believe the default brush at a 5 or 6 pixel width. Truth told, I kind of like that sketchy look. I don’t know if it would be a good style for readers, however, as it tends to look more rough. Then again Megatokyo is nothing but that sketchy style and it seems to be managing fine (I think).

In any event, I started working with other brushes and zooms. I wasn’t much a fan of them.

The brush that seemed to go with my style best was Permanent Marker, which I had tried at different zoom settings and with different widths. I like it, gives it a sort of professional look, but also lacks in pressure sensitivity. See, in the default and various other brushes, the tablet detects how hard you’re pressing down on the tablet. This means it will start with a sort of maximum depth, and the larger the width the greater the variance. This allows art to look more natural, especially for that sketch-like style. However, Permanent Marker doesn’t have that pressure sensitivity. The width is static.

I’m not sure which I prefer. We’ll get further into that experimentation another time, though. Below you can see what the three best pieces of character art look like at 100%.

Sketch style. Default brush. Drawn while zoomed in 300%.

Permanent marker brush. 6 pixel brush width. Drawn while zoomed in 200%.

Permanent marker brush. 6 pixel brush width. Drawn while zoomed in 300%.