KAYBEE

It's been a long road to get here, and I want to talk about this. I am sure this will not be something a lot of people read because there's so much text, but I have basically had nobody to talk to about this project since a certain point (a self inflicted NDA adjacent mindset), and now I want to explode before I return to not talking about it again.

This started, like many things, during lockdown which is becoming a cliche at this point. Nothing really changed for me because I work from home, but I got an itch to make a fighting game.

That's not anything I know about, and I've started many sideprojects with the intent of them being something that went on to become nothing, so I made the conscious decision of just making it as a hobby. I'll still press forward with the mindset of eventually making a thing, but the journey was started more or less without a solid destination in mind. The journey was the point.

This was something that I haven't really done since I did a webcomic called Fanboys (or F@NB0Y$). If you've read or stumbled on those comics you likely fall in one of two camps: 1) this is a generic two guys on a couch talking about games comic or 2) okay, yeah it's that, but there's something special here I can't quite put my finger on. I could write a book on the inner workings of that and my life at the time which wasn't pleasant lol. I'm rambling. I will ramble more. I apologize in advance.

There were many exciting sleepless nights working on that stupid comic if you can believe it. I'd dig into art books studying, learned to paint, experimenting with designs, write long extraneous comics, stay up until the sun came up drawing them, and feverishly checking various forums to see if the jokes hit or not. A lot of thought and passion went into them. I would tweak placement, speech bubbles, and rewrite things based on not enough or too many syllables. I developed a rhythm and a voice, and that's something I wanted to dip my feet into again.

So the fighting game started. I really like darkstalkers, so I started there. It was a victorian era vampire setting:

It took a little bit to get here. The "Ryu" of the game was a demon hunter (top far left) modeled off of Sharon Stone in the quick and the dead (look it up. you're welcome), and everyone was modeled to be at least a little bit absurd, and I got to play around with metaphorical finger paints again. It was a lot of fun, and I felt like me again!

Shortly after I thought about how bad storytelling in fighting games is, and I thought about making a separate game that was a metroidvania where you'd meet the characters. If you care:

Main Character. Very ryu kit.

This was going to be a Dan Hibiki type. He was going to be adorned with all kinds of religious talismans, and have a whip because whips are not very good lethal weapons.

A werewolf pirate woman. She'd have been a stance character. Imagine a ship full of pirate werewolves as a stage. That's such a great visual.

A mage/wizard. This was going to be a black woman, and the vibe I wanted with her was something akin to hoodoo granny weatherwax.

This guy was probably my favorite. A butcher with a large cleaver sewn onto his hand and a pig's head sewn onto his neck. I wanted to make a silent force of nature like Jason. There was an idea that he'd walk incredibly slow unless there was blood on the ground, and that'd allow him to zoom in on you like makoto.

A vampire plague doctor. She'd meet up with you and develop a relationship with you over the game. She's a vampire, but she travels around in all white clothes (black absorbs light and white reflects it) healing the sick.

A zombie groundskeeper. You can't see it, but his teeth are screwdriver heads, his legs are different lengths. He's an amalgam of different bodies and gardening tools. I really wanted him to be unsettling and scary, but gentle. There was an idea where he looked after a small child. I didn't get too much farther than that.

A cat burglar. She was a fun idea of having someone who was a very bookish, respected academic during the day, and at night she'd get to let loose and be more true to herself as a dommy catwoman type thief. I'm not someone who makes pinup art or sexy characters, but I wanted to experiment in writing someone where there was inner conflict, and the sex appeal said something about the character herself rather than just existing to be someone people draw porn of.

A male poison Ivy basically. Not a lot to say other than that. I didn't get so far with this guy lol. I think he would have been a nice contrast to the groundskeeper.

A ghost woman. She died waiting for her lover to come back from the sea and haunts the light house still holding a light waiting for him to come back. I was probably pulling from Hisako from Killer Instinct. Another Makoto type character who'd move in slow and suddenly hit hard. I love that anchor.

The bad guy. I don't know if I could have stuck the landing with the amount of real estate, but I wanted him to have a fake facade of confidence and it become apparent that he's really a small, pathetic man who is above all else terrified of death. Something like live action Homelander, but a little sexier.

(Man. Writing this has got me loving what's here again. Maybe they'll find a home someday)

Then things got weird. A lot of this project I have felt less like a creator and more like a conduit for ideas to write themselves with, and I honestly don't know if that's a common thing creators deal with or not. I started running into issues I thought were glaring, and started to search for solutions.

The MC's occupation of demon hunter was the biggest problem. Maybe it's because I'm too empathetic of a person, but I've always kind of looked at vampires in fiction as something adjacent to a victimhood. There are awful people on the top, but wouldn't, logically, there be so many more at the bottom? Wouldn't there be pathetic wretches that miss their families and the sunlight? Wouldn't these people find their other people and develop communities in the hopes of finding comfort and peace in a world where they're rejected for simply being? How could I write a story in good conscience about a institution sanctioned oppressor?

So the story shifted to test different things. The first big change was she willingly became a vampire in the end to save someone. Ehhh... that's a little cliche.

Okay, what if she's a street urchin that is indoctrinated into being a vampire hunter? Ehhhh.

What if you have to be a vampire hunter to hunt vampires? Maybe she's bitten, and she has an elder that brings her in to save her from death? That's getting somewhere, but her role is too passive, and that's not what I want.

At this point I took a break and started looking at her world. It was going to be an AU earth more or less prior to ww1, and that would give me a lot of real world history and folklore to pull from. I started to play around with that, and I moved back and forth and back and forth.

Then something really clicked out of nowhere. I didn't want to make this. At least not in this form. What I really want to make is an MMO.

I'm not stupid. The chances of me making an MMO are slim to none. The staff and the amount of soul selling I'd have to do to obtain capital would land me in super hell. It's almost certainly never going to happen.

But why the hell not? It's not like I started this with the intent of making money anyways. Fighting games are among the nichest of the niche for the most beautiful and dedicated sickos. If I'm going to die poor anyways, why not die poor trying to do something impossible.

Just about everything got scrapped.

I started building things from the story up and studying storytelling and writing and writing and writing and writing.

Here's where I can't get into too much detail. In truth, there's no telling what will come back into whatever the hell this turns into, and if I'm fortunate there will be more long essays like this in the future talking about how I got here.

There are some elements that still persist. I think the fighting game aesthetic is important. Blood (which I didn't go into a whole lot earlier) is another element I think about a lot. I started to think about things like WoW, FF14, Everquest, Ultima, etc. I started looking for flaws and things I'd do differently.

One of my biggest complaints about FF14 is that the races more or less have no justification for existing other than aesthetic. Just pick your flavor of sexy or be a potato infant. This is fine if you like this! Not everything has to be or should be for everyone.

But this path of thinking led me down to having the lightest, bulbiest of light bulb moments. I wanted to design the world around interactivity. The main character kept changing and changing and changing, and when this came around, she finally started to coalesce:

This was 2022. She's changed just a little and also a lot since then.

Again. I can't go into too many details. I can tell you in that picture, that's a crystal in her head much like Diablo lore, and her body was more of an affliction than a race at this point. The big things were her big forearms, her hand-like feet, and the tail. She was/is good at climbing, and she was designed to be something an animator would look at and want to think of fun ways to make her move.

A lot has changed since then:

(her design still isn't done. Her clothes are wrong, and I flip flop every day on her having/not having a tail lol)

A light bulb moment I had shortly afterwards was this which will sound insane coming from me, Professor Video Games Comics: Video games are a toilet industry of pandering bullshit, and what I really want to make are comics. Just all in on dying poor, I guess. There's a lot to unpack there, but I'll save it for my many future interviews where I'm introduced as an acclaimed author even though I can barely pay my rent. I made it, baby!

Back in ye olde internet in ye olde webcomic days, I have had a comic idea I've wanted to do. Again, I can't go into too much detail here. It was an AU prohibition era comic that I suppose would be described as steam punk (I admittedly wouldn't agree, but that admittedly also paints about 80% of the picture). It took place in a flying circus that was a front for bootlegging, and the cast were outcasts from around the world.

The delivery mechanism of the comic was more or less a slideshow. People were experimenting with long from scrolling comics (which have taken off as webtoons now), but I wanted one static screen. I wish I could find the inspiration for this, but this was long ago, and the closest I can probably point to is the TF2 comics even though those are not what I mean. Again. Those paint probably 80% of the picture at least. Enough for you to go "yeah, okay. I think I get it."

A thing I noticed with Fanboys was I really enjoyed the acting. This came out of a fun... I suppose guilt ridden obligation? It was very common for webcomics to copy and paste everything, and I made a conscious effort to not do that. A thing I noticed was I didn't hate drawing and inking everything, but I didn't especially enjoy drawing and inking the same thing over and over again. My comics started becoming more and more dynamic. Paul, though stationary, started "moving" more masculine, Sylvia started "moving" more feminine, and Lemmy especially started getting more effeminate. It was acting.

This prohibition era comic idea was built off acting. If I did something akin to animatics/slideshows, I could hold those fun little quirks and ticks that people do. I could be extraneous. I could make the quiet moments a hell of a lot more quiet. I could, in theory, embody each character to the point where you felt like they were people you've met before.

I also was learning painting so I could have it all be painted. I was really into Rockwell and Leyendecker in those days, and that was a really really really really stupid idea lol.

This idea has never left though, and it resurfaced at this point, and I decided "well, what if I made it look like a video game?". In a perfect world, I'd have physical miniatures, but I have a budget of me dollars, and the space of me apartment, but if I make 3D assets? I've always wanted to learn how to do that anyways. I can hand paint one tree, and use it infinitely.

Fast forward some more:

and some more:

and more:

And MORE.

And now we're at this comic. I know the immediate thing that will be impressive are the backgrounds. The writing is more interesting, at least to me, and I want to talk about that for a moment.

That started as a project to take a month or so last year. The goal was Halloween, and ultimately I burned myself out and couldn't will myself across the finish line.

The first comic was something like:

The girl walks up to the guy, and he's got an ! over his head like in an MMO. She asks him for work, and he rudely ignores her. The "!" turns into "...".

And that was 7 panels or so. It's... fine. It was okay, I guess, as a very basic video game joke. My milieu.

I rewrote it with some of that aforementioned interactivity. If this comic existed, it needed to tell you somethings about the characters, the world, and it needed to demonstrate why those characters were uniquely funny.

She's good at climbing with her weird gorilla arms and monkey feet. Those traits get shown off. He, on the other hand, did a complete 180 and went from a rude old fogy to what you see now, and she became a little sillier for actually admiring him. They both really came alive in that moment.

The joke initially ended on him looking back and seeing a pig. The pig might have farted, and ran away. It was about... 14 panels long at that point? The problem there was the ending kind of told a different story. "is it funny because he has a bad sense of smell? I don't get it." and explaining the joke without explaining the joke made it funnier. 24 panels of extraneous silence and set up. This was supposed to be a 7 panel proof of concept that turned into 6 pages worth of commitment, and I can't speak for you, but the more someone is willing to commit, the funnier I think it is.

And funnily enough this stuff might not be usable. I've given myself a self inflicted restriction of everything needs to be handpainted by me and it needs to be "game ready". This last stretch I wasted SO MUCH TIME learning how to do handpainted normal maps. If you know how crazy that is you're probably and rightfully putting a hand over your mouth and going "oh, honey no."

In the comic? Those are gone. With an HDRI, the effect was basically removed entirely. GOOD USE OF MY TIME! It's fine though. I truly don't see it as wasted time.

See, there's a story of a class that ran an experiment. Half of the class made as many clay pots as they could as quickly as possible, and half the class made them as best as they could before moving on. In the end of the experiment, the half of the class that made as many as possible was allegedly on a fundamentally differently better level of quality from making so many mistakes and perfecting the process.

I've painted at least 6 different tree bark textures, 3 different dirt textures, 4 different grass textures, rocks, metal, etc. I've made a lot. There needs to be an end to the madness at some point, but I've looked this all as essential learning. Honing a craft. Now I'm ready to drop the Rock Lee weights and punch an emo sand ninja.

SO WHAT'S NEXT!?

What in the hell are doing still reading this? Why in the hell am I still writing this? Like 12 people will get this far. Congrats to those 12 people!

Well currently I'm learning programming. I'm not a fan, but I press on in the hopes that it finally starts to feel like I know something instead of mindlessly copying tutorials. (No, you may not offer your assistance. I appreciate that the thought crossed your mind. I cannot pay you, and you and I are strangers, and, respectfully, we will stay that way)

I think my next move will be a) more comics and b) ultimately making a "comic" that is essentially a visual novel. There will need to be a patreon some point very soon, which is something I admittedly don't want to do. The crux of it is, patreon, while good with intentions, has turned a lot of you into customers of content as opposed to patrons of art, and I am morally and ethically opposed to gating my work behind a paywall and selling access to myself like a commodity, and I think it's your duty as an artist to love and respect your audience enough to treat them as adversaries as opposed to treating them as customers be pandered to.

I'd still love to make games, books, or hell even films, but that's a fine line to walk. I have a lot of complicated thoughts on this that will have to wait another day.

So a patreon will inevitably be a tip jar without rewards and nothing else. The visual novel, should it exist, will be a free regularly updating work that will probably be uploaded to itch.io, at least until a point where I can sell a physical compilation while keeping the original free.

Realistically, economic pressures might change my plans, but I really hope that's not the case. I'd really like for this to be something I work on full time instead of when I can find a moment here and there.

It's nice to finally be able to talk about this. This post is mostly for me as I'm clearly the most excited person on earth to talk about this stupid thing, but if you actually made it this far, I hope you enjoyed yourself!