Comic for Monday, May 23rd
Dear lords I’ve gotten myself into a mess with this language thing. I warned you it would become a bigger problem later. While I wrote most of the early language problems out, they grow unavoidable occasionally. I will give some thought to it, but I think for now I will continue to only use one font, but use different markers for different languages.
Reshlic is unlikely to show up all that much, but it’s not an uncommon language in Malsa as a third or fourth language. While geographically a sensible guess (Reshin being the largest of the nearby countries), culturally Malsa is fairly separated from it and considering Malsa’s pretty foreigner friendly reputation, any major language would be more likely to be spoken (Orish, for example, though while Orin is the closest of the big three, it’s the least friendly and probably the fourth widest spread language).
I think I should try to set aside some time to draw a map. I won’t guarantee it won’t change bit, especially as I’m terrible at drawing maps, but I think it’d be useful. I will at least try to make a very crude one listing the places that have been mentioned so far at some point if you’ll reckon that might help. And no, I won’t be drawing a map of the IDS world anytime soon… 😉
As for the art, well, I tried some new things. Hopefully most of them are not too noticible, cause I didn’t like how most of them worked out 😛 I tried to show soft things getting wet, man, I struggle to draw things normally. Adding complexity was not a brilliant idea. I really want to spend more time on art; I will try to really hard in this coming week to make a new vote incentive involve rain to try to work out more of the details, as unfortunately I’ve written myself into a decently long patch of rain here (unless plot god’s bring the sun back out if I can’t take it anymore 😛 )
And the black outfitted guy is likely a member of the Bureau, as that’s what we’ve seen them wear previously. And no, he’s not Don… it only occurred to me that after the page went up that he sort of looks like him… 😐
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I think the rain effects look pretty good. They certainly make the backgrounds less demanding. ^^
I think it was a bit brave and generous, actually. It’s unusual – almost innovative. And while you can make backgrounds more bland or blurry with rain, backgrounds are still needed. I’ve read a lot of webcomics and can’t even recall the last time I saw one indicate rain. Snow, sometimes, but very rarely rain. If the pages are drawn instead of rendered, it requires more effort. (Perhaps rendered rain requires extra, too?)
Well, the blessing and the curse of this comic is that practicality of making a comic rarely plays into the plot. For whatever reason, the powers that be decided it was raining here, so rain we had. It was just up the artist down the road to figure out how to draw it.
The rain is sort of tricky, but I have a bit more background in working with actual photo manipulation then I do drawing (not great at it either, but know a trick or two). It’s a combination of drawn effects and effects.
The big thing to work with imo (that I’ve done a little here) is make sure it looks like the rain is interacted with the world and not just a filter over the top. I reckon I’ll have some time to practice coming up 😉 I may even eventually try wet clothes/hair, but that’s sort of next level still, need to get more points in the art:clothing talent tree to unlock that 😛
PastUtopia, I wouldn’t worry too much. I thought the “language thing” on this page worked out rather well. At least, I didn’t have any problem following it and I could tell at a glance who was speaking what language. The system may seem a little awkward on the surface and it may take a bit of getting used to, but it does work.
Glad to hear that it makes some sort of sense. It does seem a little awkward to me, but I suppose any conversation containing three languages is probably going to be a little awkward… 😉
I’ll continue to work on it and see what we can do; always welcome feedback on how much sense it’s making.
The only part of this page which seems weird to me is how the IDS people have the brackets to indicate they’re speaking a foreign language, instead of the Malsan Police. If I understand, IDS comes from a world similar to our own, which means they would be speaking either English or a language readers have at least heard of. And Malsa is on a world extremely foreign to us and they have their own (extra-dimensional) language, so…
But that’s fine! Don’t change it. The story takes place in Malsa and it is told from that perspective, with several of the main characters from there. You want consistency. And, here, IDS would be the aliens/foreigners and their language should be very strange to them. It’s like that movie where a NASA Astronaut explores another planet and encounters the locals, who freak out at him. As weird as the situation seems to us, he’s the alien and not the other way around.
Another positive vote on this handling of language and requesting a feature of this page be carried forward to new pages.
That feature being the legend at the bottom reminding us which brackets go for which language. I think it’s shown up occasionally, but I do sometimes find myself trying to remember which brackets are which language, so the reference under each comic is nice.
The last panel you have your ending language brackets swapped. Either that or the cop is a linguistic genius and is nesting one language in another.
Indeed, fixed! Apparently I’d managed to baffle myself by that point 😉
That should have generated a compiler error… 😐
Probably an “assault” ship, not an “assualt” one?
Fixed! Thanks 😉
Grammar error of the day: I believe you mean “perimeter” rather than “parameter.” The former means the boundary of a region, which is (I assume) what you’re referring to here; the latter is usually what you input into a function (the x in f(x)).
Indeed, spellcheck can’t even save me when I use the wrong word…
Fixed, and thanks for the catch! 😉