- Written by Matej Pavlič
While I'm preparing the second comic in the RoboMafia series, here is a bit about how it all started.
I've been wanting to draw comics like for ever but was never really good at drawing. Copying was more of my thing. So I had this scene in my head for a while which was strictly Mafia related no matter the characters involved. As this idea lingered in my head I noticed an add for a comic workshop in the area and joined it. Even before that I was slowly gathering info on how to start with this and at the workshop the idea was to simply try to create a comic on our own. So I used the sketch I already had in my head and with help from Ivan (https://ivanmitrevski.com/) I had two comics ready at the end. Since then I was working on the webpage design and preparing the ground base for a faster production of comics (more on this in future posts). Well hopefully you've already seen the result.
The idea of using robots just came to me one day as of course robots are cool and seem like a good thing to start with. But there's a catch. You've seen this theme before haven't you. And so have I. Futurama already used these theme in a couple of their episodes and now I'm afraid to go back and watch them in order not to get contaminated by their influence :D In any case there is no way I can steer clear from the influence as the mafia theme itself is quite generic so I will be trying to reinvent at least some of it.
- Written by Matej Pavlič
Today I wanna talk a bit about the way I'm making my comics.
Not that I should be a reference of any sort after like 4 comics :D but still. When building an online comic platform the key is of course content. You need to have one. And by having one I mean continuosly producing new comics and publishing them on the page. For a pro artist that is not that much of a problem but for an amateur like me it's a bigger issue. People say that you don't need to be a good artist to draw comics - which might be true - but you still need a good story. So let's pretend I have one :D In order to be fast in producing new comics I've come up with a plan (which I believe others use too). I'm preparing a base for basically everything.
Now this is an example of what I'm talking about - the setup for the boss character. So what I do is I draw all components of the character in advance with each comic (some have been done before start also). Then I just copy paste with new position, orientation, ... That leaves me with backgrounds which I do in the same way. What is left is really is coloring and text. This can be seen in the first two comics of RoboMafia as you can find a lot of similarities between them.
- Written by Matej Pavlič
Well I could say I had a good excuse for not doing shit for the whole year but I'd be lying a bit. Although we had a baby in November last year I had ample time to prepare and be able to produce comics on at least a weekly basis. So basicly I can attribute the lack of my work to laziness. Well I say no more, and start once again with a clear target of regular comic releases. How often it will be I can't say but I've already drawin some of them up front but I'm also learning something new at the same time so I'm not 100% dedicated.
- Written by Matej Pavlič
Well talking about diappointment. For some time I've been trying to set up the page to go to a gallery when you click on the menu items. So first page clicks should bring you directly to the latest comic in each section but the menu items should show you the gallery with thumbnails of all the comics so you can basically click each of them which would bring you to that specific comic.
But as they say life is not cakewalk and instead of working on the third RoboMafia comic I ended up failing to do the gallery as apparently none of the plugins work as I'd like them to so I'll have to work on manually adding up the tumbs and directing them to the correct subpage, which really sucks but looks like that's what we'll have :D
Anyway, the story for the third comic is ready and I'll be soon starting with the rest.
- Written by Matej Pavlič
I've always been a fan of games, spending too much time playing them. But at the same time I also had and still have a lot of ideas for games that could be realized. I must say I'm not very fluent in computer programing languages and never took time to delve deep into them. So lacking that knowledge how do you make a game for windows or android platforms. Well it's 2018 and if we didn't have dedicated programs for that, it would honestly be a surpirise. So searching for those I got a lot of hits, from basic to more advanced ones depending on what you like, want, can afford and how complex you want your games to be, you can get all sorts of programs. So I made a list and over time I will go through all of them, installing and testing each one with a series of tutorials to see weather something is usefull for me, or anyone else. I will focus primerily on a bit more complex ones as I don't want it to be too simple, neither in graphics or game experience itself. I will start with Game Salad which I found first and we will see how it goes. A lot of the programs have a monthly payment pricing which will probably have an effect on final score as this depends greatly on weather you plan to make a game or two in a couple of years or trying to make some money of of it. Some are more helpful than others in this aspect and some offer a lot more while other still rely on the technology like flash so we will see. It will take some time for me to evaluate each program after which a short or a bit longer review will follow.