Author: zmb5135

This past week I have been focused on researching and expanding my knowledge on ARGs and TTRPGs that inspire my webcomic. Looking into ARG’s like The Sun Vanished and Perplex City people get invested in characters that they feel like they can help. Similar to TTRPGs, players love to feel agency and that their choices will have an interesting butterfly effect on what they do. I see the connections between my desire of having an active and involved community to these types of games and how I can bridge these ideas together. I really look forward to getting to work and seeing how the story expands from here! I have my social media accounts almost fully set up for the webcomic, so I am eager to get started.

I also continued to work on design sketches for characters in the story, as well began to explore how some would interact. Additionally I did some drawings of icons or logos that could be used for the webcomic.

To kick things off, this is my current semiotic square that is still subject to change. This shows what materials within my project are most important to what will be going into it.

Above are two images exploring character design after watching a Linked In learning video about character design. Thinking about how poses, clothing, and motifs in a character design can symbolize personality.

Lastly, this mash of random drawings are from following another Linked In learning video where I worked alongside the teacher to explore the drawing app I will be using to make my comics and all the features that it has to offer me. The video is a speed paint of what I did, which is fun to look back on and watch to consider how I can improve what I did for future projects!

A story that captivates an audience is one that pulls them in with attachment to characters and having a story that means something to them. In a fantasy setting, people like to explore these new worlds to escape their own, so that  they can empathize and worry about someone else’s problems rather than their own. Webcomics are an ever evolving and growing, why not emphasize this unique way of storytelling by bringing the audience further into the world and let their choices impact the story. By combining the elements of fantasy intrigue and audience interaction, I will make a webcomic that utilizes a secondary polling platform that the audience can actively vote on when a choice is available. Helping decide what a character should do when there is a fork in the road.

A storyboard from between my process of modeling and animating, showing some process of how I wanted the final animation to appear for the Possible World project.

Two renders of my Possible World project! The first image is from the first half of the animation I created where the Snake is not visible until it fades in from space. Creating the effect of it magically appearing to circle the earth. The second image is from the later part of the animation where the snake has fully manifested and begins to make its path around the planet. I’m very happy with the result of the project, while the star field gave me a little bit of trouble, but shrinking down the sky sphere seemed to have increased the quality nicely.

Final Animation for my possible world project, I had extra time so I was able to edit the video with captions and audio! I’m happy with the results and being able to share this interesting story from Norse Mythology.