Where is it?

Ok so i have been fooling around with cs for a week or two and this is what i came up with.
Its a story set at the end of the last ice age after people moved into the british isles, where the english channel is today.
Now im no writer so be patient.

now i have the story in my head but im having trouble with, grammer, flow, ect
ok so injoy

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/101514702/A%20Tale%20of%20Phil/web/A%20Tale%20of%20Phil/index.html

ok lets hope this works.

oh and the female storyline is not complete so pick the male.

this is going to be alot of work, its not done yet by far, so any help will be appreciated

First of all, your artwork is amazing. Consider me envious.

With that said, the rest of the game could use some work. I can tell that there's a very well thought out story in there, but it's a bit hard to read.

The perspective changes had me really confused until I figured out that it was actually dialogue. You may want to add quotation marks to clarify that.

You also have a tendency to switch between past and present tense. Try to stick to one or the other.

Also, you have a lot of very long blocks of text. Breaking them up by making smaller paragraphs or adding a *page_break will help the reader not lose interest.

There are a few other grammar and spelling issues (you want "gait", not "gate" on the first page), but fixing the things I mentioned will take a huge step towards making this a really good game.

I hope to see more of it. :)

Thank you for the complement, all 13 drawings took less time than getting the code

I will get right on those corrections.

MAybe my mind is just friend, but it was hard(ish) to follow and read. Ill try again at a later time.

I added a bunch of *page breaks.

So how can i make it easyer to read ?
is it the begining with the story teller or is it just all togeather hard to read.
maybe better if i put dialogue and discriptive text on different lines, or is it too discriptive.
I use "you" alot do you think I should change that to "I"

I noticed that you forgot this symbol right here " " alot when people were talking.

yeah i am in the process of adding quotations, commas, capitals like crazy.

im an artist not a writer and its showing, what if i made drawings with speech bubbles
like a choice of comic book?.

Fantastic idea! I think an interactive comic would definitely suit your talents much better. :)

I'm sure a lot of people would be interested in seeing something like that done in ChoiceScript.

Yeah the idea spoke to me, but ive done all this text work, but who knows, i might just make up a few pages, what if I incorporated both the comic and text.

But would that take away from the readers mental imagery?

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/101514702/Drawings/Rude%20wake%20up.JPG

Like this prototype.

@Pale_Strider The quasi-Mesolithic setting really appeals to me as I think it's a rich era with great potential for a ChoiceScript game. Here comes the but.

Honestly, in my opinion, it's a waste of your real talent. You clearly have some terrific, extremely creative ideas in your head, but you yet lack the ability to express yourself properly in words. In fact, I can practically feel your frustration in your writing.

Your real creative talent is art. I don't pretend to know much about such things myself but it seems to me you're a complete natural, and if I were in your shoes that's how I would seek to express myself. Moreover, I see absolutely no reason why you could not, or should not, use ChoiceScript to develop interactive comics, with the reader able to make a choice every few pages, say.

After all, "a picture paints a thousand words . . ."

I think an interactive comic would be great. Something new and as Vendetta said, there's no reason why it wouldn't work. Your art is amazing and it would be interesting to see how you would go about this.

As for the reader's mental imagery, would a first person based outlook work?

First of all thank you for the feedback.
I'm going to try it out, might as well play to my skills.
Sad though I put a lot of time into this, I did a story just because I draw so much.

But there is no CS comics so I guess I will do a mock up.
Wouldn't hurt to take a couple of days off writing.

Oh and Vendetta you have one of the best story's here.

@Pale_Strider Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it. Oddly enough, I've always yearned to be able to draw something more than simple stick men . . . I envy you that remarkable talent.

I definitely think it's worth pursuing the interactive comics idea, and I look forward to seeing what you come up with in the mock up. I'd suggest keeping the branching fairly limited to begin with, and perhaps with the initial storylines deviating just for a short while before merging again, just to test the whole concept. It might make it more linear than a typical, written ChoiceScript story, but you're pioneering something new & exciting here so I don't think you need to get too ambitious too early . . . It will already be unique. ;)

I'm going to follow my story, but all the discriptive text will be art, the dialogue will be in bubbles and blocks, I'm working on it right now, but Celtic knots are time consuming.

I might have a page or two done by tomorrow.
You know for the last 3 years or so I have really wanted a writer, I draw all the time, people, aliens, ships, animals.
I have a bunch of story ideas, I just can't write, that's probobly where the frustration in my writing comes from.
Other than this I have a space story and a fantasy, I have drawings for both just nothing written down.

@Pale_Strider

You seem to have the opposite problem to me. I can write decently but can't draw which is ironic considering I'm told often that my stories suit comics lol

This game looks interesting and your art is very stylish good luck with this project :-)

I wonder how many artists are on this site?

Remember astro boy, at the end where it's like a flip book with him running and then he jumps and starts to fly, that's when I started drawing.

Any scenes you would really like to see in a stone age comic?

Ok the first page is done, what do you think of this.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/101514702/Drawings/Firstpage.JPG

so would you read this?

Thats so kool i would read it. :D

Nice arts!

Whoa! Love it! How long does it take you to draw?

Wow, that's some speedy artistry. Looks good! Your comic version is so much clearer than the text version.

That's much better I had no idea what was going on in the text version

Love it! Excited to see where this goes.

Right on, nice to see you like it I drew that yesterday, If I try I can do a page like that a day, maybe more if it's not so complicated, those knots really beat me up.

I put all the dialogue on a separate layer if I need to change anything let me know.

Ok here is page 2

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/101514702/Drawings/page2.JPG

In the last box, you probably want:

Food and a warm drink were on the old Teller's mind. The road had been hard.

Or:

The road had been hard; food and a warm drink were on the old Teller's mind.

The second suggestion is just a bit of stylistic editing, so feel free to ignore it if you prefer the original flow of what you wrote. ;)

Thank you CS_Closet I'll take the second one.
I think since I wrote the story with a guy in mind, I will do the comic with a female lead any suggestions on that.
Also for every choice I'm going to have to draw a new page so I'm going to be holding of on branches for a while.

I've never actually found an interactive comic that gave an option on the lead character's gender, but in my experience with making visual novels, it's easiest if you never really show the protagonist clearly, or only do so occasionally during important or gender specific scenes. This cuts down a lot on the amount of drawing needed to be done, and you can just change the text layer to reflect the gender.

Of course, I think your game would be just fine even if you didn't have the female lead option, but that's really up to what you want to do and what you're comfortable with.

Oh I want both genders it's more work but,
Well I'm just going to erase the lady and draw in the guy when the time comes its no big thing.
I have ideas already for what they will act and look like, the male is me, and the fem is my first crush mixed with two secret historical people and some bear grills thrown in for survival tips.

Hey heres something i think if you only have a picture on a page it wont let you *page_brake so is there a work around ?

@Pale_Strider Coming together nicely. :)

I had that problem adding chapter title images for Vendetta. I ended up putting a simple

>

symbol before the *page_break command.

Thanks Vandetta,
But I couldn't get that to work so I put page 1, page 2 it must need some text to proceed .

That's strange--I've literally just got:

*image vend_chapter1.png
>
*page_break Begin Chapter One

and it works just fine, both online and offline.

Then again, there's nothing wrong with using "Page 1", etc. either. :)

I fool around with it when I wake up,
Page 3 is up

@Vandetta yup it does work but there is a
>

Between the image and the next button.

Ok I'm going to get started on page 4.

@Pale_Strider Yep, it's not a perfect workaround. As it stands at the moment, you have to have some text between an *image and a *page_break--probably because the *image command was originally designed to illustrate the story, not to be the entire page in itself in the manner in which you and I use it. It will probably get tweaked in due course to allow for this (as I think image-only chapter header pages are likely to become more common as time goes by) so I wouldn't worry too much about it just yet.

Ok page 4 is up, any thoughts on it so far ?

I'm going to get started on the first choices.

Ok I'm having a hard time with the transition from comic to choice I have to write the choice out, but should there be a single page with the choice action then the consequence? or go right to the consequence of that choice you picked?

Any thoughts would be welcomed

The only advantage I see of one way over the other is that going straight to the consequence lets the player fill in the details with their imagination. That could be a bad thing, though, if you had a very specific scene in mind, or the choices aren't explained very clearly.

I would say this one is mostly up to the author's personal preference. If you want to draw the scene for the choice, go for it. :)

@CS_Closet
and
@Vendetta

You have been very helpful, but I'm wondering if I should quit, there seems to be not much interest in this,
You two are the only people to post anything in like three days.

but
I'm going to start work on the first choices anyway,which i think I'm going to cut from three to two, because sneaking out the window / door is too similar to draw separately, then the Forrest and river scenes.

@Pale_Strider I don't think it's a lack of interest so much as reserving opinion until there's enough of an interactive element to the story on which to actually offer comment. You clearly have the artistic talent to bring this story to life--there's no denying that!--so now we're waiting to see what will make it different from reading any ordinary comic. Personally, I think you've made a great start and I'm keen to see where it goes from here.

Do bear in mind also that players here generally appreciate larger helpings in one sitting, rather than being fed piecemeal. This applies as much to the written stories as it does to your own, much more innovative, approach. Small updates tend not to engender much enthusiasm at all as it's more difficult to judge fairly, or indeed, even to offer suggestions. It's much easier to provide useful feedback on larger chunks, after sampling and carefully considering the whole. For this reason I would suggest uploading an update only every week or two (or however long it takes) and each time aim to offer a whole new segment of the story in one go.

@Pale_Strider I'll second @Vendetta's advice, all of it. I for one am intrigued by the idea of an interactive comic book, but I've held off commenting until I could get a better feel for the story you're writing/illustrating. I think you're an amazing artist with a gift for the comic book medium, but I still don't feel that I've been presented enough of the story to make much in the way of comments beyond that. So don't give up. Stick it out, and in time your perseverance will be rewarded.

Thank you
@Vendetta
And
@P_Tigras

I think I just need a break, I have been working very hard on this , I can't think of what to draw for the next page, I have drawn and eraced three pages so far today, and it's hard because I don't really have anyone to talk to about page construction i have never done anything like this befor, but I don't think I can ask what people here thought of the part I'm trying to draw now, because I have been told it was hard to understand.

Here's what I do to draw a page
you see the blank page, then you have to think what pictures are going to go on on that page, where , and in what order, then you have to draw it while thinking what the dialogue is and where your going to put it when your done drawing, its a lot of visualization followed by hours of drawing, and when I get it done I put it up here.

I hear what your saying about lengthy updates but I don't want to get to far ahead and hear its to hard to understand again because eracing text, and changing a comic page is very different, if i draw five pages and hear they are hard to understand thats like days of my time.

I think I should just skip the choices altogether for now and just concentrate on the story, like do the best possible story arc then start in on the choices after.That's really what's going to separate this from a normal comic the choices what you do where you go ect, but my comic will be limited in that I can't use the "if" commands to change stuff based on your choices, I will need to draw all that stuff out. Like if you choose not to be friends with the girl from the Dead Bear clan I will have to *goto to a page that I eraced her out of, instead of saying *if Talla+ 15 blah blah

Really I need just need feedback any feedback, just for a reason to keep going, its a little disheartening to draw for 6 to 8 hours and see nothing here, That is why I put it up on this site for opinions, at home I have nobody to talk to about this, it's just me here.

Or maybe I'm just having a bad day.

You have a cup deep in your gut
That's filled by inspiration
And when you pour that cup out
You have a puddle of creation

@Pale_Strider

Never give up. As long as one person reads it it'll be worth it. You're doing something no-one else has done. Of course it'll be hard but the reward of finishing it will be worth it.

As your game will be primarily art based you should definitely focus on drawing the comic before worrying about choices.

You are an extremely talented artist keep it up and good luck!

Yeah I won't quit I think I need to finish this it will be good for me.

But

Stephen King said you should work on two stories so when you get stuck, you switch to the other
Maybe I should start a new one till my "tale of Phil meter" fills back up.

I have another story that I think is more fun than phil and it's never been done befor and it's soo cool I can't say what it is for fear of it being stolen I have art for it but it's coolness deserves a better writer than I.

Oh and thanks for the art complements.
But there not perfect like nobody noticed on the first page, the palisades have no rope binding them together :-D
I have to remember to fix that.

If you want help from a writer I wouldn't mind helping. If you want to see how I write have a look through my unnatural topic that should give you an example of what I can do.