Category: Uncategorized

Duzida Back-Up Comic

I’ve been using the printed version of Duzida to write short comics that add something to world.

Here’s the comic from issue 2 which takes place around a year before the issue 1 begins.

I’m working on one for issue 3 as I write this about the Metazurians reaching Earth for the first time. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about you can read Duzida here) They’re also a good excuse for me to experiment with layouts, which will be more apparent with the next one.

Visual Dairy 2

Here’s some more visual diary entries from the past month-ish.
I’ve tried my best to avoid talking about COVID/ Lockdown etc as much as possible, as hard as it was at times.

As this is (partially) univerity work, I was asked as part of the module to draw some entries with my eyes closed and honestly, I love them.

Fonts

While I’ve been studying I’ve gotten in to making my own fonts, which is something I’ve wanted to dabble in for a while. Going back in to education gave me an excuse to finally make them.

Butternut Regular is my most recent typeface. This was the first one I used a grid to make, the other have been completly freehand. Why Butternut? Cos the letters are… squashed.

Eat The Rich based on some hand written text from some posters I made in the past. I made it to save time more than anything. Kinda ironically, I’ve not really used this one.

BozoRoboGX was also made as a time saving measure. The idea was to use this for lettering comics but when it’s used in speech bubbles I’m not super happy with the kerning, it’s fixable, but it takes away the point of it being time saving. Though it has come in handy for a number of projects, both personal and academic.

Hero Booster

The idea of Hero Booster is pretty straight forward. I wanted to make a card game based on Tokusatsu Heroes full of troupes and silliness, but I also wanted it to be accessible. One deck would be all you need for 2 players for a game that would take around 15-30 mins to play, with the option of spicing it up with an Expansion Deck.

I wanted to make a game that I would buy and that’s also a little bit niche. And I have, at the time of writing this blog post the project is (for now) complete.

There are 4 kinds of cards in Hero Booster; Heroes, ATK Boost cards, DEF Boost cards and Special cards. Your Hero gets powered up, or Boosted, with ATK and DEF Boost cards to try and do more damage to your rivals Hit Points and you use Special cards to do things like gain lost HP, revive defeated Heroes or discard your rival’s cards.

Hero Booster is a project I’ve been chipping away at, mostly in the background, since around 2014.

I always wanted it to be something that would actually get made but it wasn’t until December of 2018 that I finally took the plunge and launched a crowdfunding campaign for it. With a goal of £1300 and around 100 backers the game was fully funded, in the end, it reached “£2786” why the quotation marks? Because what a certain popular crowdfunding site doesn’t show you at face value is the pledges that were dropped or the fees that are taken off when the person running the campaign receives the funds. It ended up being closer to £2000, which although was still more than the original goal, I soon learnt that I had grossly underestimated how much I’d need for this project.

Things got a bit rocky in my personal life at the start of the project too, a close family member passed away during the campaign and shortly after it was complete I lost my job. I did the best I could throughout 2019, getting the Main Deck printed (plus customs tax) used pretty much all of the funds so I had to get bits and pieces for Hero Booster printing through the year as an when I was able to do so. I also haven’t considered how much more artwork I’d have to do and how many times I’d have to print prototypes.

By the time 2020 rolled around I was fully back on track with the project, I only had one thing left to print, the Expansion Deck, and I was looking at shipping in March/ April. I think you can probably guess what caused a further delay, 2020 has pretty much turned in to a write off for all of us.

Hero Booster has been a massive learning curve for me. I’ve never done a project like this in the past and I’ve never run a crowdfunding campaign that’s ended up being fully funded. There’s a lot of things that, in retrospect, I’d have handled very differently. If I were to do something like this again it would go a lot more smoothly. Once all the crowdfunding rewards have been sent out I’ll only have a handful of Hero Booster Main Decks up for general release, I’ve spent so long on this project that I don’t really want it to stop there. I’m not sure what my next move with this project will be, but hopefully, I can keep going with it.