The Far Side of Utopia

Updating out of the buffer at 12:00am wordpress time again! 🙂

This is going to be a long post, so only read the subsections you care about!

Art Updates and Tweaks. (with poll on bubbles!)

So there are a lot of minor changes on this page, and some less minor changes.

Things like the white boxing, cross hatch shading, and the return of gradient fills are the sort of thing that come and go around here as I try to figure out what looks best, but I think the transparent bubbles are a slightly bigger change, so I’m turning to you guys on this one, share your thoughts here in this poll:

http://strawpoll.me/4412403

I’ve done a few tricks to try and make sure we aren’t sacrificing readability much – there is a white shadow behind the text so it stands out a little more against dark backgrounds, etc, but if you have trouble reading, please vote no! Note that I probably won’t take just the popular vote, if there are a lot of no votes, I’ll go back to solid for sure regardless of yes votes, as I want to ensure that it’s still readable for everyone.

The prompt for the change is you lose a lot of panel to solid bubbles, and things tend to look more choppy. With backgrounds slowly getting more detailed and drawn, it would be nice to have more space to work with.

Patreon Bonus Pages Return!

Additionally I’m happy to announce that once again through the ending of the month I will do a bonus comic page for every new Patreon the comic gets (at any tier). The comic will update a maximum of once a day, and additional Patreon-prompted updates would be queued on the next day that wouldn’t have an update otherwise. I’m not putting a limit on how many these can be queued. Call my bluff world. 😀

It’s also worth mentioning that Patreon once again is ahead of the comic for the appropriate tier.

I would like say that I really appreciate any reader, Patreon or not; I try to keep mentioning it to a reasonable level as this is an amateur hobby for which I don’t expect to make much money currently, I’m just super appreciative to those that can support it through Patreon, donations, participation in comments, or promotion.

My Status and “Job”.

Below this is sort of a long and un-important update on where I’m at and what is coming! I cannot in good conscious recommend you read this rambling. 🙂

While I haven’t started physical therapy yet, I’m definitely coming out of the other  side of the injury at this point – I’m still in a sling, but am able to get around and work on the computer for fairly long periods of time, and off kind of pain killers that make the world dizzy.

As some of you know this is a hobby of my full time hobby of developing video games (I am, after all, a software engineer and not an artist), but the last few months derailed an already off the rails project, so I’m for the time being turning full time to drawing while I explore my options.

Full time drawing is vastly more time than I need to produce three pages a week. In the short term that means rebuilding my buffer, in the long term we’ll see what it means. I do not plan to revive Past Utopia, Print!; while it had historically higher traffic numbers, it was never as fun to write and draw, and made much less money despite its higher traffic (due to the magic of ad revenue calculation and traffic behavior and sources).

What does this mean? I’m not sure yet. I could go daily on this comic, but I genuinely don’t think I have the audience to support that level of investment yet (though I love the audience I do have!). I could start a second comic updating once or twice a week – I have a handful of concepts I could run; before my injury I was considering starting a Superhero comic (called Hero Romp – and even registered www.heroromp.com for it). This idea isn’t off the table, but I’d have to be sure I have a story worth telling to jump into that market. I could write a prequel or side-story to The Far Side of Utopia – I plan to do that eventually, but again I think I’d rather wait for more art skill and a bigger audience to be able to tell those stories in best form.

I could start on a simpler video game project than the last one (which is currently on hold); this could tie into one of my other media projects or not. I’d like to do this at some point, but am not confident I have a solid idea right now on what.

Lastly I might get a job of the paying kind. This does not mean the world will end the sky will fall; if I do, I can guarantee that The Far Side of Utopia will remain active; it may be reduced to 1-2 updates week or I may hire an artist to take over drawing if necessary, but it would continue; at this point it’s a hobby I don’t want to give up.