This marks a weirdly large update! While my free time has waned greatly in the last month, I was really hard at work ironing out this very special feature for the site. Please welcome the opening of the mysterious Character Corkboard! I wasn't thrilled with the old character bio page I had. It worked and provided a tepid overview of a good amount of characters, but it was really representative of a different direction the comic went in. Rather than spend the time rehashing old bios to be a little more current, I decided to implement this neat little interface where you get a more intriguing and cryptic version of character profiles. I don't want to say too much on it, but just understand that this single page is a huge addition to the comic in so many ways and largely sets the tone and pace for how I'm going to move forward on The Dandelion Patch. This is additionally just something you'll have to see later to get what I really mean by this, sorry!
Starting Act 3 is my next big priority, but nothing in this comic is going to come easy from here on in, so do be patient with me while I slowly get things together in the little free time I have anymore!
11.21.24 About Me Page Added!
There isn't much to report on today. After the marathon of making Chapter 15, I had to enjoy the burnout period and rest my hands. All the while I've been doing little pokes and plans at what's coming next, but I could not get myself to execute anything in the last few weeks. The biggest project coming now is a character bio page that goes really above the call of the old one. I'm really excited to deliver it, but it's going to require a lot more proofreading! Until then, I did fill out an About Me page! I had always hesitated on doing one of these. First because I was always kind of hesitant to talk about myself online, but also just because it didn't feel like it worked well on a website where literally everything is eventually going to be designed to be plot relevant in some way. Time and wisdom have sort of let me say 'eh who cares I want to write a funny thing about my history of making things!' Please allow me my vanity, good reader.
11.02.24 We finally made it!
As I have hinted at, Chapter 15: Despair & Descent is finally here! I hammered at this chapter for months to get it looking exactly how I wanted it to. It represents the potential of the format the last 14 chapters of The Dandelion Patch has had tucked away inside of it. For a long time, I was very interested in this scrolling webtoon style for the comic, and I knew it allowed me a lot of artistic freedoms that traditional pages wouldn't have. I think this ground up against a desire to be space efficient for a long time, and I think a lot of readability ends up being sacrificed because of a misunderstanding of what having a comic online offers in terms of presentation. Chapter 15 shows off what I think is the best I can manage in expressing the raw spectacle this format can provide, and I am VERY proud of how it turned out.
This chapter also home to a short little visual novel bit, and I don't want to give away a lot, but I think it too represents a nice reprisal to the Virtual Patch games that really pushes those features to their breaking point (literally. It took two weeks to get any of this to function properly!)
The comic is going to probably take a little break while I recover from the amount of work setting this up on my personal time, but also while I try to envision what's next for the comic. I'm not sure I can top Chapter 15 without doing something very different, and I am going to try and see if I can find a new way forward without changing things up too much!
Don't worry, this will not be a 4-year break again! While I am mulling things over, I will be doing some work on the website, adding more side/supplimental content to try and make the site even more fun to explore. In addition, I have also moved the Virtual Patch games to the comics page, instead of being on the Extras page. I think these interactive games are essential to the work, and they absolutely belong as a part of the comic. I need to do a little tweaking to understanding how exactly I plan to implement that, so bear with me while I do this tidying up. Anyway, you can read Chapter 15 by clicking here!
10.15.24 Please welcome the update log.
In the interest of making the front page a little more presentable, I've decided to place my ramblings on updates in a tucked away page. There are some changes coming to the website which will hopefully make it a little more pretty to explore, as well as being more friendly to archiving older art assets for being viewable again. This includes old banner images and maybe a few more 'about' sections. Frankly, the 7 year existence of this website has a lot of its other sections feeling sparse, so I thought it might be nice to add more extra features. Anyway, I finished a phone chapter hot off the heels of Chapter 14. I am very much enjoying the new method of creating these through HTML exclusively, which allows me to do a lot more editing on the fly, as well as not needing to drive myself nuts fiddling with a psd file full of premade bubbles to fit certain lengths of messages. Painstaking bullshit. Chapter 15 is also just around the corner, and with its completion, Act 2 will be complete! Should I not tell you guys that? Should it be a surprise? Let's say it's a "finale special" so I can pretend it's exciting! Anyway, you can read Chapter 14.5 by clicking here!
