Concept Art: The Ferrywoman, Part 2

The Ferrywoman, Page 2

Some more art this week for The Ferrywoman. These are mostly playing with hairstyles and her hooded look and another full body pose.

Her eyes weren't originally all black. I kinda made them all black on a whim.

A few months ago, I was reading about the Black Eye Children urban legend and I started getting some new ideas for future episodes of This Mortal Coil. I began linking together the urban myth and my character, The Ferrywoman. Maybe there's a connection between them that could be fun to explore.

At least exploring the creepiness of black eyed children could be a fun Mortal Coil story.

In any case, don't be surprised if you see children with black eyes appear in the story.

The Shrine

This week I continued working on the Shrine. Some of the features I added:

• There's now a simple way to visualize the player inventory on the sidebar.
• Sounds for the animated typing text and also clicking on selectable regions
• A way to shake the character graphic using a scripted node from Fungus.
• An on-screen cancel button to exit out of character dialogues
• I reorganized all of the characters in the asset folder so it's much cleaner
• Kamiko's original "Rabbit and the Moon" Lolita look got upgraded to using the new version of her for the visual novel
• a bunch of sundry bug fixes here and there as well

The tech side of things always come easy for me to work on. My excuse is that I'm doing this for my webcomic and I get to indulge in using my code to express something "artistic."

I am getting to the point where I'll have enough of the code done that I can context switch and begin working on what I really need there: more content.

Content in Phases

With that in mind, I was thinking of doing a story driven quest, but I feel The Shrine would have to gain a lot more traction before that happens. So maybe the content rollout should look more like this:

"Phase 1"

Character Introductions. These would be loose, stand alone dialogues where you're introduced to the characters. I could introduce more townspeople and give The Shrine a sense of daily life through conversations with the characters. It would give me time to sculpt their personalities and connections to one another.

Oh, and continue to roll out tech to support things in the future.

I could do a smaller, limited quest as well.

Mainly it would be wrapping my head around writing multi-branching dialogue and really sussing out what I can do with what's essentially a virtual stage/theater.

"Phase 2"

The next step would be to create a story. This would be a story with 2-3 characters who are introduced in Phase 1 and the story would take place over a few weeks. Players would come back at certain times of the day or days of the week.

This will probably be a really difficult challenge: How do you keep people coming back and playing?

With video games, it's all about instant gratification. You do a thing, you get a thing. You don't have to wait. Get the sword from the old guy in the cave. Go kill monsters.

The Shrine is more like: In the morning, Kamiko gives you a sword. In the afternoon to early morning go kill monsters. Bring me back the monster bits next Monday.

Something like that...

It happens over realtime and not a compressed scale of time that video games tend to have.

In a sense Phase 2 is the goal of the Shrine:

Tell a story set in the Mortal Coil universe. Make it interactive, but have it happen over a week to a few weeks.

And then this has to play alongside the fact that you might not be there for a story driven quest. You might just want to interact with the characters as a slice-of-life vignette.

It maybe a bit before we get here. First I need to build traction for the Shrine.

That's all for now. More concept art pages will come in the following weeks!