I recently launched a Kickstarter for a Homestuck adventure game project. I would highly appreciate it if you would take a look and consider making a pledge!
First, I'd originally planned to put more in the game than this, but it was running a bit long, so I decided to chop it up. I'm planning two more installments of this game, probably to be released over the next couple weeks. All the art assets and stuff is there, I just need to work with Alexis to crunch it all into a couple more new games.
Speaking of which, thanks to Alexis, MSPA's tenured CODER OF GAMES, for working on this. It's a little different. It's the first time we're not using Flash. Only the intro is Flash, but the game is coded in HTML5, which makes it a little more robust in some ways, but will have some issues with less common browsers. I've copied a note from him about it all here. Take note especially of browser info: best viewed in Chrome, Firefox is ok but not ideal, IE is very buggy and won't show the Flash intro, and Opera/Safari aren't tested at all.
Thanks to the artists (scroll to bottom) who worked on assets for this too. They've made a good deal more than you see here, which will appear in other installments. Thanks Stephen, Tanney, Peter, Amanda for making environment assets, and Chaz, Lexxy, Vivus, Xamag for the talking portraits. Special thanks to Amanda for making all the little walking sprites, as well as a whole lot of environment stuff and items. Everything looks really great.
And of course, thanks to contributing musicians (again scroll to bottom), and Toby for editing everything. Some things from the contest album Universe A, notably Fuscia Ruler by Sinister Psyche as the main song. See Toby's post for more details.
First album of the month: Symphony Impossible to Play by Clark Powell, who was also responsible for the album "Medium", "Homestuck Anthem" and quite a few other HS tracks. Next solo album coming in a couple weeks.
Do you like Problem Sleuth? Do you like PROBLEM SLEUTH BOOKS? Here is Volume 4: Black Liquid Sorrow. Holy crap, what a classy cover.
It would also appear there is a new shirt in this section. Maybe you would like to wear it?
Another piece by M. Brown. I told you we had entered the Brown Zone, but you didn't listen. It's not in an album yet, and won't be for a little while. Not until some time after Solo Album Month, which according to my calendar is happening REALLY SOON.
Only one more pause to get through before we start cruising again. Unfortunately this will be the longest one. PAUSE ONE was 8 days. PAUSE TWO, including the trip to SDCC, was 19 days. I'm thinking PAUSE THREE will be slightly longer than that. I'll guess about 3 weeks. I have a lot to catch up on that does not involve working on Homestuck. Stuff I have neglected due to a solid month of non stop animation and travel. Some book work to do. Some secret projects. And, yes, some of this pause will involve working on HS a bit as well, as I get the next Thing ready for you to see.
Thank you for your patience. Hang in there for EOP3:A6I3.
Briefly unpausing PAUSE 2 to bring you these updates, and then pausing again. There will be no more updates until the EOA6_3 animation.
As of right now, I have not spent a single second working on that animation. I just got back from SDCC, produced the above updates today, and now the REAL PAUSE TWO begins. The part of it that involves me actually working on it. It is just layers upon layers with these pauses. They are like onions, especially insofar as they result in your tears.
I wish the last week could have been dedicated to animation labors to shorten this wait, but I was in California fraternizing with radical fans of my popular web cartoon. It was pretty cool. But now it'll be loads more days before you see anything here. That's how it goes sometimes.
August will be SOLO ALBUM MONTH. There will be some good solo albums released throughout that month. Mark that on your calendar. Just write "YEAH!" across the entire August grid, that should do it.
I was counting "[S] Dirk: Synchronize." and "[S] Dirk: Unite." as one animation, that just happened to be chopped into two parts. Next one is EOA6.3, at the end of Pause 2. Song: Unite Synchronization (Sometimes I name animations after songs. Descend, Cascade...) By Malcolm Brown. We have entered the Brown Zone. You have been warned.
Beginning PAUSE TWO now. I'm off to SDCC. Maybe you are too? Are you wearing a costume?? What am I even talking about. You're probably wearing one RIGHT NOW.
SIGNING TIMES: 12:00-3:00 each day. (7/12 through 7/15)
I'll be with the Topatoco booth, but it's possible I could be relocated to a different signing area for crowd management reasons. If this happens, I'll do what I can to alert you, through the twitters or such.
There will be some major pauses in updates coming up, mostly due to Flash animation chores. There will be exactly three pauses. Two of them will be related to animation. The third will not.
PAUSE ONE: This starts RIGHT NOW! (July 1st) I will use this time to work on the first animation. I have to travel to SDCC on July 11th. It's very likely I will finish the animation before that. Once I post it, pause two will begin.
PAUSE TWO: I will use this time to work on another animation, to end A6A3. It will definitely be longer than pause 1, because it will include my trip to SDCC. That trip will kill an entire week of animation time. I'll likely have to start work on it when I get back. Cross country travel is preposterously disruptive, and it's going to slow everything down.
PAUSE THREE: This will begin immediately after pause two. It will not involve working on animation. I'm reserving this time to catch up on the huge amount of chores I've been badly neglecting, and will continue to badly neglect during pauses 1 and 2. The irony of animation pauses: you see nothing for many days, but I'm working at least twice as hard, doing nothing else. It's a break for you, but an anti-break for me. So I need to schedule an ACTUAL break to do stuff that needs doing. Book work, plus tons of other things. I don't know how long this pause will be yet. Probably longer than either of the first two. Let's look at it sort of like the end of a "season", where the season was all of act 6 so far.
The bottom line is, this is all going to add up to a whole lot of "me not updating Homestuck" for a while. It's not really what I want, but there's just no way around it.
I guess that's all there is to say for now. See you after pause one!
Edit: wait, something else I wanted to mention. Recently some music team guys helped me update the sound credits page, so that each entry links to the song in an album. That way, for any Flash page, it's easy to find out exactly where that song is on bandcamp. For those newer to the site, I suspect this may be helpful.
Back from a busy weekend in Toronto where I met JUST SO MANY cool Homestuck readers. Look at what happened while I was away:
You can either get book 2 on its own, or in a nice funpak full of numerous books. There was briefly an offer for signed + stamped books, but those ran out pretty quickly. Sorry if you missed the chance, but I have to cap the number of cutomized books so I don't get impossibly inundated. There will surely be opportunities for signed + stamped and/or sketched books in the future.
These books are turning out to be a nice way to access the story, in my view. Probably better than I expected. Even though they sacrifice some elements like animation, to me there will always be something more inviting about flipping through a book than staring for hours at a screen, no matter what sort of magic a screen is capable of. So far the tradeoffs have been worthwhile to make this collection. This one is a little more refined in its layout (as well as 100 pages thicker) than the first one. Chris has been doing a good job putting these together. I expect them to keep getting better as we go. Also, don't forget each book includes hundreds of author notes. Some of these notes are even informative.
Some brief points in the FAQ department before I go: Book 2 contains all of act 2. So yes, book 3 will contain all of act 3 plus the intermission. Book 4 will contain act 4. Then we'll see what happens. I'll try to get book 3 out with Topatoco's batch of fall releases.
