Pixelart Webcomic: Updates Regularly.

[Neoriceisgood]

Comic: Path to Greater Good



www.neorice.com


Hope you enjoy the read if you decide to read it;

Latest Page: 183



http://www.neorice.com/aptgg_latest


For those confused about the format:

there's 1 world where 3 stories take place.


Noah's story.
Burk's story.
And Tobi's story.

In essence I'll be running 3 comics in the same style within the same world.

DA Comic Gallery
http://neoriceisgood.deviantart.com/...o-Greater-Good

All the pages are posted here, to reduce lag in this thread I've decided to make this link to the comic the main means of access rather than posting all the individual pages as images.


Original Intro Post before comic started [long]

Spoiler

Show

1. Intro
Good day, as the title of this thread indicates, I've been thinking about starting a webcomic.

Now I've been working on this webcomic concept for around a month now, and in that time haven't even produced a single comic yet, isn't that something?

I know!


The big reason for this is the fact that I'd like to get the general idea & style "right" pretty much immediatly, for reasons I will explain in a later part.


Because I'd really like to get feedback on every aspect of my idea I'll make this post rather long, for those not interested in reading a wall of text, just keeping C&C to one specific section [say, art] would be greatly appreciated.

That being said, here goes.

2. Comic Layout [all the screenshots used here are purely old examples and not intended for the final comic]



Because I've never been quite fond of either paneled pages or word balloons which have been nearly essential for printed comics but aren't quite that essential for webcomics I've tried going for something a bit different.

Although I'm not entirely sure of tthe filetype or format I plan to use for the comic [I've been considering making it out of Flash files, unless I can find something preferable]

my idea right now consists of having a main box with fixed panel size to show the actual "comic" in, which is always accompanied by a dialogue box where the dialogue can be placed [sound effects would most likely remain in the "text on screen format as comics do it.]




You can keep in mind that there'll be a few variations for the text box to either allow short quirp exchanges or more explicit explanations/monologues.

Although the text bar's size is more restrictive than a text balloon, I doubt that there's a lot of things that honestly wouldn't fit in either of these two variations.

As you may have noticed in these shots, the text bar will also be accompanied by a portrait of the character speaking, this way no confusion about who'se talking is necessary, and it'll be easier to make out the character's expression if the small size of the sprites may make it more difficult.


3. Art Style





One thing that's taken up a lot of time and development for me is trying to get the art style down right.

As seen in the example shots in section 2, I went from fully digital backgrounds to hand drawn, computer coloured backgrounds which is mostly a change based purely around the fact that due to my tablet being rather laggy [and necessary for replacement] & the fact that it requires more work to look "finished" the purely digital backgrounds are far too time consuming right now to be an effective way to add backgrounds to a comic. [if I want to have any hope for semi-frequent updates]

I've settled down with the current background style as it's both easy/fast for me to create a new background & they do give a clear enough representation of what type of location a scene takes place in.


As is probably obvious for now, unlike the backgrounds characters, portraits & certain props will not be drawn but pixelart.

Although it's not necessarily so, I'm strongly of the opinion that having an unique and noticable style or trait to your comic often gets you a long way, combined with the fact that I consider myself more of a pixelartist than a traditional artist right now, going for character sprites and a so called pixelart comic format is honestly the only way for me to go.

Obviously this has the big "cut and paste" advantage which gives another boost to avoiding overobnoxious time consuming when it comes to actually making comics, though I will add that I'd probably end up making a lot of seperate/new poses as it goes on, because I don't plan to make a talking heads comic.

Talking about talking heads, each character with dialogue gets a little pixeled portrait with a few emotions, I think it's a neat little way of adding more personality to the sprites aside from how they move/behave body wise.


4. Story/Design Concepts

This may be the most wordy part of the comic, and here's the catch.

I can make it pretty much spoiler free as well.

concept 1:



An image can say more than a thousand words, but just state the obvious anyway.

A lot of stories have a hero, I don't like single perspectives a lot as they don't make sense to me.

A duo tends to lead to polar opposites.

W..what's that TVtropes?

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PowerTrio

That's right, there's power to a Trio.

It's less polar than the duo, but still a manageable number.

One idea that was fundamental to my earliest concepts of this story was the idea of having one world where three different stories take place at the same time.

The big concept here is having all three protagonists have their own seperate stories, but as they go on the events from one story may start influencing the other story, or perhaps odd/unexplained events from one story will "unintentionally" be explained in another one.

Obviously this is partly speculation about possibilities and although I do have some rough plot ideas that influence all stories down, I don't want to constrain myself and would prefer to have the story write itself when I finally start it.


Concept 1.b about the protagonists

As a reader of a comic called Dominic Deegan I know one big problem that can appear with having one protagonist, it's pretty easy to fall for a bit of a uhh...

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...oralDissonance

type situation where the main character is set in such a typical hero role that you're either with the good guys, or oppose em, making a lot of grey/dark grey areas appear "white" to the supporting cast purely due to this character being "the hero".


I hope to have all three protagonists be good in their own eyes but still have all of them have notably different morality & objectives, although I'm pretty sure it'll be a lot easier for the general crowd to call one of them evil over the others if the story goes as I've got it planned right now, I'd really like to play with the idea of character morality a bit by having each of them follow a distinct path.

Obviously just telling about ideas won't mean I'll actually succesfully manage to pull off what I'd like to present, but I have no real intention on starting a webcomic without really thinking through what's important for me to have as the more noticable traits of it, story wise.

Concept 2. "Magic"

I'll have to keep this one rather short, but it's another concept that I've grown far more interested in as a story element due to Dominic Deegan [I'm sorry, I'm a snarker.] being sloppy with it/about it at times.

I like science, I like explanations.

I like fiction, I like magic.

I get disgruntled when a more "serious" magic-based story with systematics doesn't bother going out of it's way to have magic make sense in and off itself.

Now in a more easygoing enviroment like a RPG, or games like D&D I honestly don't care about the idea of having to shout "fireball" to shoot a fireball.

But when you're trying to make your own story with depth and a logically sound magic system, you gotta ask yourself this:

"do physics speak english?"

Although I won't blame anyone for doing this to keep to the traditional fantasy idea of magic, or to emulate D&D [Hey, I love OotS and it wouldn't be the same if it tried to stick to all sorts of rules of logic] in some cases it can upset me.

[I'd like to give examples of shows/comics that do this that explicitly upset me due to it, but in most cases I just don't read em to begin with]

Now this wasn't necessarily the flaw that got me thinking about magic more in Dominic Deegan though.

Anyone up to date with the latest arc -must- have noticed.

Two mages can pretty much destroy an entire town within 5 minutes by shooting at eachother.

Magic is a pretty huge influence on the world.

They have flying boats, protective scrolls [for sex, don't ask] and a lot of other things that make it noticable that magic really matters in this setting.

A lot of people wondered why there's not things like a resistant mage-busting squad, why there are even towns in the series to begin with, because every single own shown so far has been attacked by a mage at some point.

[and often got destroyed unless Dominic was there at the same time].

The big question "If magic was this influental, would this world even have civilization anymore to begin with?" crops up.

I'd like to give the big example of the anime "Death Note" as a representation of what a single powerful magical skill could do in a normal world, it'd change society entirely.

When introducing a magical concept it seems important to me to ask what influence it'd really have on the world, and more importantly, what would the world do to fight this influence? you don't want to go the DBZ route and just have magic users be these omnipotent wakes of destruction wandering around -and- have them be really common at the same time.

Either way, realising how huge an influence magic would be is a great concept/plot point in and of itself.

For this reason I want to avoid making magic a really common every day thing in the world I'm setting up.

Although some ideas may change, the comic will take place a few decades after the so called "dawn of magic" where an otherwise unmagical world much like our own starts experiencing a small number of magical events and people capable of using magic.

[I'll keep the rest of this point open for now, going too deep into the nature and properties of magic in this world would probably have big story/character spoilers as realising the truth behind magical events is a big part of all three character stories]


Concept 3. "villains"

Voldemort and Sauron, you know what's easy to do? write a sick twisted evil megalomaniacal character who somehow got a huge following behind him eventhough he openly associates with being "evil" and make it out to be the villain.

Now I liked LoTR and don't know enough about HP's ending to judge Voldemort's motives fully, but as stated, LoTR could get away with it because it's pretty much responsible for "reviving" the classic idea of pure evil as a villain.

This being said, I'd like to go for some originality in the aspect of antagonists, and above that, I'd like to manage designing at least one or two antagonists who may actually get a few people who aren't completely socially inept to support them/take their side on a few things.

Though I'll admit that writing understandable antagonists for three stories isn't just difficult, it's unlikely, but really minimising the number of characters [especially the ones with influence] who go around calling themselves evil is something I'd hope to have.

[comical villains excluded for obvious reasons]



Well, that's all I've got to say so much, I'm pretty sure that the overal lenght of this post may work against people's interest of replying, but hey, at least you can't say I haven't thought about this all.

Just to close the post down, here's a few character sprites I made a week or two ago [most of them probably won't be used though, as 90% of them are from a storyline I scrapped entirely after working out the fundamentals enough to realise it completely contradicts what I wanted to go for idea wise.]



Peace,
Neorice

[Green-Shirt Q]

Holy mother of cheese.

This art looks awsome in almost every description possible.

[BisectedBrioche]

Its an interesting choice of art style. Did you make the sprites yourself or what?

[Neoriceisgood]

Its an interesting choice of art style. Did you make the sprites yourself or what?

Yeah, it's 100% original art, too many sprite comics out there that just rip stuff from games.

[Weiser_Cain]

How'd you keep everything so 16bit-y?

[Neoriceisgood]

How'd you keep everything so 16bit-y?

Don't quite understand the question, elaborate what you mean by "everything"?

[Wreckingrocc]

That's ridiculously awesome.

If you'll accept it, I'm willing to help in any way I can.

Since SnD (My comic) got really boring for me and sorta died (it might get revived soon, though), I'm pretty open. I'd love to get a hand in helping you. You said the major concern was time. Would you mind if I worked as a background artist for you? It'd be very fun for me, and this looks very promising. I'll show you some of my work if you'd like to see it, or I'll make a sample background. Of course, if you want to do this on your own, that's perfectly understandable. It looks awesome.

If my offer/request is turned down, I'll definitely be reading this intently.

[BRC]

Have you seen my Jaw, I think I dropped it somewhere in this thread.

[Neoriceisgood]

That's ridiculously awesome.

If you'll accept it, I'm willing to help in any way I can.

Since SnD (My comic) got really boring for me and sorta died (it might get revived soon, though), I'm pretty open. I'd love to get a hand in helping you. You said the major concern was time. Would you mind if I worked as a background artist for you? It'd be very fun for me, and this looks very promising. I'll show you some of my work if you'd like to see it, or I'll make a sample background. Of course, if you want to do this on your own, that's perfectly understandable. It looks awesome.

If my offer/request is turned down, I'll definitely be reading this intently.

Thanks for the offer.

I gotta be honest though, I hadn't even thought about getting help on the comic aside from feedback & criticism to help me improve as I go on.

The time-problem explanation for the backgrounds was actually a reason explaining why I went for the hand drawn backgrounds rather than fully digital ones.

Eventhough I'd probably prefer fully digital backgrounds that looked like full fledged paintings for real eye candy, my current tablet's too broken to allow this, and even if it wasn't it'd honestly require me ages to get a background like this done.

The hand drawn backgrounds [under section 3, art] are what I'm gonna go for.

I can get a proper background in the hand drawn style + colouring done within an hour or so from an average estimate by those two backgrounds made so far, and this only concerns "big" panel backgrounds that take up more that can be shown at a 1x zoom and take up the full screen.

For certain backgrounds like inside rooms/tents and the like there's no real need to allow 1x shots so they'd take even less time.

As me being an artist is one of the big reasons I'm actually making a webcomic to begin with, help with art actually wasn't the first thing on my mind.

That being said, I do appreciate the offer & interest, I know from my own experience that wanting to be part of a project is often the direct result of digging it a lot.

So thanks, I'll keep your offer in the back of my head though, who knows.

[Wreckingrocc]

M'kay. Thanks for keeping me in mind.

I'm also willing to help with editing (you PMing me a finished comic and me scanning it over for mistakes/possible improvements to be fixed/made.

...Or anything else you have in mind.

Good luck! I hope to see #1 soon :D

[Weiser_Cain]

Don't quite understand the question, elaborate what you mean by "everything"?

Well how did you keep the character sprites a standard size and limit the resolution?

[KerfuffleMach2]

Awesomeness!

Anywho, I like your choice on showing how magic can change society. That's not something you see often.

Me and a friend are working on a Flash animation series, and about 2/3 of it takes place hundreds of years from now. In that future, people do have magical abilities, and there is still futuristic technologies. So, it'll be fun to show how the two combine.

I like your layout. Very unique. The backgrounds are done well, too.

I look forward to when this finally comes out.

[Wreckingrocc]

! Everything suddenly makes so much more sense!

I know why I love the art style now! It is very reminiscent of Legend of Mana.

And the quality makes it look almost exactly the same.

EDIT: Once these come out, I just know I'm gonna want to pull up Gamemaker and whip one up... The backgrounds and sprites'd make it really easy to whip up templates fast.

[DoomITP]

Wow...Your sprites are amazing. You could get paid for those.

[Hoplite]

With art quality as professional and awesome as this you don't have to care about lay-out, it looks great as it is.

Seriously, it is the best sprite art I ever say.

[Exeson]

I would most definitely read this. The main reason is your story angle. I have been toying with the idea of writing a story where the two main characters are each others enemies, as in they both feel they are morally justified and that the other one is in the wrong. Due to time I have not been able to do this but would really enjoy reading a story that, if not the same, has a similar feel to it.

And the art is just awesome.
....
way more than awesome.

[Neoriceisgood]

Well how did you keep the character sprites a standard size and limit the resolution?

Well they're pixelart to begin with, and I show them at either 1x or 2x.

You can keep the resolution "16bit" in appearance if you only multiply the numbers by full digits of 100 [and I resize em in MS Paint in most cases, because photoshop likes to AA the moment you resize].

I would most definitely read this. The main reason is your story angle. I have been toying with the idea of writing a story where the two main characters are each others enemies, as in they both feel they are morally justified and that the other one is in the wrong. Due to time I have not been able to do this but would really enjoy reading a story that, if not the same, has a similar feel to it.

I'm not necessarily saying they'd end up as enemies though, the first few chapters of the comic most likely won't have any real interaction between the three heroes yet, and I'm leaving it in the air if they'll ever meet face to face.

Having a defined goal like the three of them becoming enemies/friends that becomes clear really early on would be kind of boring, I want to try keeping the plot open as I go along, but who knows.

With art quality as professional and awesome as this you don't have to care about lay-out, it looks great as it is.

Seriously, it is the best sprite art I ever say.

Ever run into a comic you didn't want to read because the text bubbles were unreadable and annoying?

Thinking about a readable layout is a good way to avoid one of the worst problems a comic can have, unreadability.

[sometimes you're more inclined to read a bad/terrible comic over a rather good one because the good one is unreadable due to font/layout.]

! Everything suddenly makes so much more sense!

I know why I love the art style now! It is very reminiscent of Legend of Mana.

And the quality makes it look almost exactly the same.

Yeah, the Mana games [especially sword of mana and SD3 for GBA and snes respectively] have always been a big inspiration for me to pixel, I doubt the styles would be confused if put side by side though.

I'm also willing to help with editing (you PMing me a finished comic and me scanning it over for mistakes/possible improvements to be fixed/made.

Yeah, that could be helpful.

Anywho, I like your choice on showing how magic can change society. That's not something you see often.

Yeah, obviously I gotta see how well it pans out first, promises are just promises until they're made, but it's still a good idea to keep in mind when making the comics.


As I don't really have any program or knowledge on making the comic work as a panel-by-panel setup with clickable buttons like the ones shown I'm probably gonna have the first comic in a more "page" like fashion, panel per panel.

As I've finished most of the sprites & characters necessary for it, I hope to post it in my next update of this thread.

[Prime32]

Interesting style you have there. I can't say I've ever seen a webcomic quite like it (though it reminds me of screenshots I saw of Freshly-picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland ).

I have been toying with the idea of writing a story where the two main characters are each others enemies, as in they both feel they are morally justified and that the other one is in the wrong. Due to time I have not been able to do this but would really enjoy reading a story that, if not the same, has a similar feel to it.

Ever watched Death Note? Code Geass? Gundam SEED? They have that kind of mechanic - in the latter two cases, they were childhood friends.

[charl]

The art is awesome. I look forward to reading the finished results.

[Atomsized]

Whoa.

And the sprites are 100% original, that is something i don't see everyday.

When people try to create a sprite comic, i always see the actions of the characters very very limited creating a brick road of repetition, but since you made these sprites yourself, i can see this becoming a very unique webcomic. However, i can't imagine the time it would take to design one of them, so i would suggest making sure you are devoting enough time to start and hold on to the webcomic.

But all in all, good luck, and i'll be watching out for it.

[Lissou]

I really like it. Let me try and organise my thoughts.

1) I have to admit that to me, each "strip" will be more like a "panel", if I'm making sense. And in a way, you have less freedom, since with this format, every pannel will have the exact same size. No way to have one pig page-wide pannel, and next page have lost of short pannels to show a fast action.

That's okay, though, it's achoice you made. it means your comic will be more dialogue-oriented, most probably, unless you have special "cut scenes" or "fight scenes" with different formats, or animations.

2) If you have animations, it means you're saying from the start that you will never sell your webcomic in print. Think about it, and the possibility to instead sell it as DVDs for instance. I can't imagine putting that much work into something and knowing it can't ever evolve.
Also, I've stopped reading comics because they didn't offer the option of buying books and reading those instead. So it's something to consider.

3) Have you worked on something so you can keep the same image on top, but scrool the dialogue without quite changing pages? It would allow a whole scene to appear on the same page, without having to press next every time the dialogue changes. If the characters stay in the same position, and since your art choice doesn't allow for angle variations and such, it might get a bit... boring. Or seemingly useless to have several, different pages with the same image.

4) As for the content itself, it looks pretty interesting. The threefold story is the type of story I really like, so thumbs up on this one.

5) The character pictures you showed us... Are you going to use them for the cast pages? To keep the videogame feel of your comic, that kind of castpage would be amazing.

6) In your sprite list, I'm a fraid a few of the characters looked similar to each other, which could get confusing. Mostly, though, they look individual enough that the story should be relatively easy to follow.

7) On top of showing the face of the character who talks, are you also showing their (known) names? If not, you might consider it. People won't forget who's who that way, so take advantage of the fact that it's possible in your medium.

8) As atranslator, I'm happy that you chose a format that should make translations relatively easy. However, it will be even easier with the "scrolling" option, that only changes the part of the image with dialogue. Just saying. maybe you don't want your comic to ever be translated, but if you don't have anything against it, let's just say it's another advantage to the "scrolling" option.

9) Let's get this straight :P When I say "scrolling", I don't actually mean scrolling, right? Just, the "next" would apply only to the dialogue, not the uper picture.
Imagine a video game. It's like pressing the key that makes the dialogue continue. While changing scenes completely would be a different arrow, for clarification, the way I see it at least.

So... That's pretty much it for now. Please tell me what you make of my comments and what your plans actually are. I can't wait to see your comic, which looks like you put a lot of thought into it.

[T-O-E]

I thought those were professional game sprites when I first saw them.

Whoa.

And the sprites are 100% original, that is something i don't see everyday.

The only other sprite comic I've seen with decent pixel art was "A Modest Destiny".

[Oregano]

It looks really good. That is all.


EDIT: As in, that's all that needs to be said.

[Neoriceisgood]

1) I have to admit that to me, each "strip" will be more like a "panel", if I'm making sense. And in a way, you have less freedom, since with this format, every pannel will have the exact same size. No way to have one pig page-wide pannel, and next page have lost of short pannels to show a fast action.

That's okay, though, it's achoice you made. it means your comic will be more dialogue-oriented, most probably, unless you have special "cut scenes" or "fight scenes" with different formats, or animations.

If I go for a more page-like setup than the panel per panel system I could possibly avoid this.

To be honest, I'm still working on changing this around a bit, I'll post a quick comic I made today to give a good idea of what I'm currently planning to have the layout be like.

I decided to change it up a bit due to the fact that if I'd require flash or another program to even start on it, I'd have to wait a while to get & master the required program, rather than being able to make the comics on the spot.

2) If you have animations, it means you're saying from the start that you will never sell your webcomic in print. Think about it, and the possibility to instead sell it as DVDs for instance. I can't imagine putting that much work into something and knowing it can't ever evolve.
Also, I've stopped reading comics because they didn't offer the option of buying books and reading those instead. So it's something to consider.

I'll be frank in saying that I never really thought about really "selling" a comic based mostly in sprites in printed format.

I'm not actively planning on animating it as it'd put the time/effort rating far beyond the rating that's still do-able in a regular update fashion, so technicaly it should be possible to print it.

3) Have you worked on something so you can keep the same image on top, but scrool the dialogue without quite changing pages? It would allow a whole scene to appear on the same page, without having to press next every time the dialogue changes. If the characters stay in the same position, and since your art choice doesn't allow for angle variations and such, it might get a bit... boring. Or seemingly useless to have several, different pages with the same image.

Again, the example comic I'll post will give a general idea of how I'll work, my comic is partly inspired by reading A Modest Destiny back in the day, and that never bored me eventhough it had fairly stagnant sprites.

As long as new poses, background and story development is part of the comic, it won't necessarily be "boring" that some images appear more often.

An ironically good example would be OotS itself, which has a very template-like art style going on, it's not a comic that relies on dynamic angles and other weird perspective tricks, but I'm sure nobody would ever dare say that makes it boring.

4) As for the content itself, it looks pretty interesting. The threefold story is the type of story I really like, so thumbs up on this one.

Thanks, I do have to see in what order/pattern to present the three stories, I'm guessing per arc/chapter would be best, as switching it up between every single comic would just get distracting.

5) The character pictures you showed us... Are you going to use them for the cast pages? To keep the videogame feel of your comic, that kind of castpage would be amazing.

The moment I'm confident enough this'll be a lasting project to set up a website for it I'll definitely try to make a site with a good 16bit rpg game feel to it.

Although I won't make promises, having cast profiles that resemble stat screens from games does have a huge appeal to me.

6) In your sprite list, I'm a fraid a few of the characters looked similar to each other, which could get confusing. Mostly, though, they look individual enough that the story should be relatively easy to follow

I'll throw in the defence that a large number of characters in that list [especially the ones in school uniforms] are purely meant to be background NPCs of one type or the other.

Although I agree that I should be careful with making any important character distinct from others at such a small format, the reason there's a lot of characters there that look "similar but individual" at the same time is due to the fact that I want to refrain "templating" NPCs.

Due to this they may seem more important than they are because they're not the same generic looking character recoloured twenty times, but, if I can manage, all unique to at least some extend.

7) On top of showing the face of the character who talks, are you also showing their (known) names? If not, you might consider it. People won't forget who's who that way, so take advantage of the fact that it's possible in your medium.

I could, I hadn't considered it yet, but I definitely could.

I want to avoid "revealing names", but as you said, if we know the name already it definitely would work. [I know that it'd help me if comics had that, because in a lot of cases I forgot the name for 90% of the characters real soon]

8) As atranslator, I'm happy that you chose a format that should make translations relatively easy. However, it will be even easier with the "scrolling" option, that only changes the part of the image with dialogue. Just saying. maybe you don't want your comic to ever be translated, but if you don't have anything against it, let's just say it's another advantage to the "scrolling" option.

The dialogue will be part of the image, but due to it's location can very easily be erased and translated.

To be honest, the big reason I chose this format is my complete inabillity to judge how big text balloons should be when setting up a page.

[and it looks more game-like as well, which is kickass]

So... That's pretty much it for now. Please tell me what you make of my comments and what your plans actually are. I can't wait to see your comic, which looks like you put a lot of thought into it.

Done, and, done.

Expect the first comic soon.

[Wreckingrocc]

For the bubbles, just type [Spoiler]Then type whatever you want in the button bubble here, then you type[/Spoiler].

Those are in noparse tags, so if you copy them directly, it should work. This is how it will look:

Spoiler

Show

Put what you want in here!

Spoilers are primarily used to prevent large screen-stretching and for organizing the comics into simple-to-read sections, i.e.

Chapter 1

Spoiler

Show

Story Arc 1: The title of titles

Spoiler

Show

Comic 1-1-1: The first comic

Spoiler

Show

Comic 1-1-2: This name is even better than the first.

Spoiler

Show

Story Arc 2: The Birthday Party

Spoiler

Show

Comic 1-2-1: They didn't know...

Spoiler

Show

Comic 1-2-2: In the town

Spoiler

Show

...Etc, etc. You can see that posting all the comics in a row would take up a great deal more room. With spoilers, you can minimize the room they take up.

I suppose if you eventually get your own website and learn flash, it might be possible to have the buttons at the bottom of the screen take you from comic to comic. Right now, though, in Vbelletin, I'd recommend just sticking to spoilers.

[charl]

Making a simple website that allows you to go between pictures in a folder in numerical order is fairly simple. It doesn't require flash either, plain old PHP is enough.
There are many freeware PHP-scripts available to do this. Just google for "webcomic script" or something similar.

[Neoriceisgood]

For the bubbles, just type [Spoiler]Then type whatever you want in the button bubble here, then you type[/Spoiler].

Those are in noparse tags, so if you copy them directly, it should work. This is how it will look:

Spoiler

Show

Put what you want in here!

Spoilers are primarily used to prevent large screen-stretching and for organizing the comics into simple-to-read sections, i.e.

Chapter 1

Spoiler

Show

Story Arc 1: The title of titles

Spoiler

Show

Comic 1-1-1: The first comic

Spoiler

Show

Comic 1-1-2: This name is even better than the first.

Spoiler

Show

Story Arc 2: The Birthday Party

Spoiler

Show

Comic 1-2-1: They didn't know...

Spoiler

Show

Comic 1-2-2: In the town

Spoiler

Show

...Etc, etc. You can see that posting all the comics in a row would take up a great deal more room. With spoilers, you can minimize the room they take up.

I suppose if you eventually get your own website and learn flash, it might be possible to have the buttons at the bottom of the screen take you from comic to comic. Right now, though, in Vbelletin, I'd recommend just sticking to spoilers.

Yeah, I've seen some other comic threads on here, I was planning to use the spoiler tags when I had several parts done.

[Lissou]

Going back to what I said earlier:

I know that OOTS is "static" in some cases. However, it's in a page (with multiple pannels) format. What I meant was that if you keep the same upper image too much, it could be a problem. What if people don't realise right away that clicking "next" worked? What if they double click accidentally and don't notice?
Skipping a pannel when reading a page doesn't happen often, but skipping a line of dialogue accidentally seems possible.
However, since your whole update is alwyas one big picture, and not some kind of template in which you load pictures and type the dialogue, I guess you can't really do it differently. That's not really a problem.

Also, My DVD idea wasn't about animating it. More like having the strips as a slideshow, possibly with the viewer deciding when to switch to the next one.

I realise you're not doing it for money, and I'm not saying you should be. I'm just talking from my point of view, the point of view of a reader who often wishes she had something to show for a comic she likes. Not being able to actually own a physical copy sucks, and I've stopped reading many comics for that reason. Do what you want with what I said, after all you won't be able to please everyone.

My name idea was like some video games, in which when you don't know a character's name it either shows "???" or "old woman"/"nobleman" or whatnot.

As you said, it's not rare to forget who's who in a webcomic and that would help.


Finally, something I forgot about last time...
Each one of your pages/images will be one image with not a lot of dialogue. As a result, will you update several at once? Will you update very often?
What I mean is, the plot can't advance too fast that way. It might also be alot faster to make, taking less time for every single page.

But if you update several pages at once, it could get confusing if they're not on the same webpage.
Or are you planning to realease them on the same webpage? In that case, it would go back to being a pannel in a bigger page, wouldn't it?

Anyway, I'm very excited about this and I can't wait to read your story :)

[Neoriceisgood]

Finally, something I forgot about last time...
Each one of your pages/images will be one image with not a lot of dialogue. As a result, will you update several at once? Will you update very often?
What I mean is, the plot can't advance too fast that way. It might also be alot faster to make, taking less time for every single page.

But if you update several pages at once, it could get confusing if they're not on the same webpage.
Or are you planning to realease them on the same webpage? In that case, it would go back to being a pannel in a bigger page, wouldn't it?

To be honest, I have two conflicting ideas on how to deal with this.

At one hand I'm thinking a more "page" like layout could work as I'll show in a bit with my example comic, but at the other hand a few of the more critical people I showed pretty strongly insist that the "panel per panel" format I had in mind at first would hold more appeal to them.

The fact that both have advantages and disadvantages makes it hard to say which one I'll go with in the end, as said, I'm still experimenting a bit right now.

Thanks for the feedback though, I appreciate it!

[Weiser_Cain]

Or you could animate it. There are so few web comics even limited animation would make it standout. Especially if it's in that two frame video game style.