Conception and Production of "Death" Hand Fans

While you wait for your little taste of death arrive in your hands here's a little backstory to the development and production of how I got these things hand fans made!

Making a Thing...

My friend Sarah and I were sitting at my booth last year at Anime Expo, one of the more sweaty convention I've exhibited at (due to extremely hot California sun), when we noticed how many people were fanning themselves with AX Program Guide Books. I'm not sure if Sarah was joking when she said it, but when she suggested I make fans for people to cool themselves, I took her absolutely serious. 

"Death" Hand Fan Design Mock-Up in Adobe Illustrator [ 17.4" x 8.7 ]

It took me months of searching for a company to produce these for me. With the quality that I insist on having to sell anything at my store, this was a little harder than I had ever expected to encounter. With a few minor set backs, botched prototypes and misunderstandings, I did however finally find a great company who was willing to work with my anal retentive artistic eye. 

Since this was all new to me I had to re-explore design concepts. My initial idea was stupid. I was just going to put Death front and center with no consideration of how a fan is held or what it would look like on this medium. I'm glad I came to my senses. After researching what other more artsy fans looked like I came to a conclusion that I should try to make her maximize the space as much as possible, without sacrificing the darkness that having a lot of black ink surrounding her.  Once I was happy with the design, I sent it to my production company and received the most disappointing prototype photo ever.

Learning Experiences

Now here is a great learning experience I really want to share with every one because I could have saved quite a bit of money, time and frustration if I would have understood this better. Never make assumptions that a company you are working with understand your vision. When starting the conversation with this company, I told them I would like to print on Silk and use dyed black bamboo for the base. When I came to them saying exactly what I wanted, they assumed I knew what that entailed as far as printing goes. I did not. Below is a photo of their printing sheet on silk after they ran their printers for production. I was dumbfounded by how off the colors were from what I had sent them above!

Attempt to print on silk with high color density.

When I saw this I asked if they had played with the colors in photoshop or something and only then told me "When printing on silk, the colors need to be soft because silk does not take ink well." Well thanks! This would have been great information to know ahead of time. To add to the frustrations they also had already printed the entire order and were only checking in with me at this point to see if I was happy with the printing. Really? UGH! After a bit of arguing back and forth (only a few emails, thankfully) we worked out a deal for them to fix the issue and print on sturdy paper. I had to repay for setting the printer and a new sample, but everything else was taken care of, they were actually rather accommodating (after I raised some hell with them of course). I wish I could say that this was a fluke, that companies never do stuff like this, but the unfortunate truth about producing things (especially in mass quantities) is that for a lot of companies its cheaper for them to run their printers once and blame it on you if their are mistakes than for them to start their printers a few times to get it perfect. I had similar issues with my book, and have heard from many other artist friends that encountered the same. Suffice it to say, once all the issues were worked out with this company I was extremely happy with the final production. 

Packaging

I really wanted this to be something special, so instead of just printing fans and having them only packaged in the standard little polybags they came with, I looked into getting custom red velvet pouches with my logo on them. With that I also wanted to include a certificate card that I have now hand signed and numbered as proof that anyone who bought one received a limited edition from my first run of fans ever. When preparing packaging I learned 2 things really fast. 1) get quotes for everything you need before you start any sort of production and 2) try to use one company for everything; hand assembling and producing from multiple vendors is like having one of those vomit-migraine you get after drinking too much alcohol and dropping dinosaur acid. Because of how small I needed the cards, the company I use to print told me it was a custom shape and would need to charge me nearly 5x what it ended up costing me to just print standard business cards and cut them in half! Which is what I did. The pouches, much like the hand fans, had a similar issue of production where they screen printed everything before I gave approval. They misconstrued a line in one of my emails and assumed what it was I was green lighting was the entire production, not just my size requirements. Fortunately, in this case, there weren't any major issues and and the bags they produced came out wonderful.

[ See more production photos on my Flickr. ]

Anyway, that's what it took to produce these amazing little pretties. Hopefully are enjoying my massively long Development Blogs and at least find the information I ramble about useful in your endeavors!

Destined Legends: The Development

This last year I've been so swamped by the various projects that I've been working on behind the scenes, that I've almost forgotten to clue everyone in on exactly what it is that I've been doing! Now that you've read my previous blog on a bit of the story on how Destined Legends begun, I thought I'd take some time to expand upon my actual involvement in the development and what it took to get this thing made. 

Alpha Testing

Early Version of the Destined Legends Playboard

Before we even started looking for artists, we had to make sure we had a pretty solid concept worth our time. I'll tell you one thing, when Ali and Shawn (the games creators) first approached me about this game, I was super intrigued and I couldn't wait to try it. The first play through of the game though was rough. The concepts were definitely there but coming from years of playing JRPGs, MMORPGS, Adventure Games, and so on, the amount of influence we could pull from was enormous! The original version of the game had Boss battles, armor, accessories, high level HP and so on. In a video game this is ok, you slowly learn and find new things as you explore the vast world you've entered into and can spend over 20+ hours of game play to figure it all out. This, in a card game however, is a huge barrier of entry for most people and can quickly turn a new player off before they even give the game a chance; me included. It can be daunting if you are expected to understand everything before you even get a chance to play and we quickly learned what things were over complicating the game. For example, using hit points that equal 1, 5, and 20 is much easier to manage of than numbers above 1000 (it's over 9000!). It's not that the math was overly difficult, but when you are expect to also keep track of maintaining magic points and remembering what accessories have what skill for certain attacks, the game becomes more like dealing with your accounting books before tax time than an enjoyable way to relax with friends.

First play test with people outside of development.

Even after taking out some of the extraneous mechanics, we learned the hard way that not everyone has the same learning curve or understanding of what you assume to be common gaming concepts. After several months of "in house" alpha testing we began to introduce the game to our first round of people outside of development. When we hosted our first play test and focus group, we were rather surprised by results. As pictured above, the first two people who tried out our game had never played a card game like this, let alone RPGs before. What was really interesting for us as developers was to watch people who didn't know any gamer jargon what-so-ever start to not only understand phrases like "you take 10 HP" but use them and even get excited when they get to say it! This first test went surprisingly well, not because the game was in any way perfected, but more so because the two people were genuinely having fun! The downfall however was the time it took for them to learn the games core rules and be able to complete the game in a reasonable time. If I remember correctly this particular play test exceeded 3 hours! 3 HOURS! Thank God for good beers and great company. 

Early Destined Legends play test before any final art was added.

Mind you, our goal was to make this game playable in under an hour, not a several hour endeavor. We understood that the above case was based on the players lack previous knowledge of these types of games, but from the notes we took we were able to re-evaluate why certain aspects of the game took so long, even when we played it between the development team. I think in these first 6 or so months of development we scrapped, added and refined so many aspects of the game that by the time we were ready to enter Beta Testing the game was barely recognizable from the original conception.

Beta Testing 

Testing without a playboard, making sure it wasn't needed for basic play.

The way we went about introducing the game to focus groups was sort of interesting to me.  Instead of starting with "mega gamers" who would no doubt understand the game with out a problem, we started in reverse. The group above consisted of my girlfriend at the time and a good friend from college, neither of which played games often (if they did it wasn't the hard stuff). We then expanded to groups of intermediate/casual players and then people who considered themselves gaming experts. I'm not sure this was intentional for any of us. It may have been an unconscious comfort thing to make sure we wouldn't embarrass ourselves or perhaps we just wanted to challenge the mechanical skills of the game as we got more confident in it. It was likely both reasons, but either way, it worked out to our advantage. This fact forced us to immediately cut out the fat that made the game way too hefty of an idea for the casual player, finding the essence of what was important to the core game then rebuilt it from the bottom up, challenging and improving it each step of the way.

Our core Beta Testing Group near the end of development.

Our core Beta Testing Group near the end of development.

Once we got to a stage that we felt the game had all the elements we wanted in it and that the game was getting close to production we began our most intensive section of testing! At this point we started having multiple games going at once with people who really understood all the rules and asked them to do everything possible to essentially break the game. When we said this, the true creativity of some of our more advanced players came out. They would try layers of different strategies, things that we probably would have never came up with on our own and really challenged us to make sure every rule made sense. I'm really glad that we requested this from our testers because it helped us weed out some really odd ball loop holes from that came from the particular phrases of our rules and little mechanical glitches that worked well in most situations but wouldn't in the very specific situations they would discover.

Open Beta Test Deck [Kickstarter Collector's Release Only]

One thing I must stay that I'm incredibly proud of about this game was how diligently Ali worked on the game's core structure as a whole. He would show me algorithms he developed to keep game play balanced as a player would level up, probabilities that certain attacks would succeed and ratios to insure that cards would be pulled out of the deck at decent rate. I'm not sure that I would have the know how or even have the patience to come up with these things on my own. Ali however had a dream and was determined to make it work. I wasn't there for all the building of the game's mechanics (that was made from Shawn and Ali expertise) but I know seeing how important this endeavor was to them keep myself and all the people who volunteered their time testing this thing, motivated.

In the next blog I will discuss the artistic development and overall creation of the game's design.

Women of Interest

Elizabethan Autumn

Changes to Words of Interest

Words of Interest, as some of you know, is my "word of the day" comic in which I use royalty free victorian artwork (or my Whale an Squid characters) to not only tell a joke, but hopefully teach the reader a new word they may have never had a chance to learn. Personally, out of all my comics, this concept has always been one of my favorites. I love learning new words and finding fun ways to put them in sentences and/or use them in my daily vernacular! Using clip art (borrowed or made by myself) also provides me with the opportunity to work on better jokes because I can spend less time working on art and challenge myself to write something outside of my box. Though, I will admit sometimes I don't land every joke, but really that's the point; This comic is also a writing exercise for me to become a better writer as well.

Victorian Cadence

Victorian Cadence

As much as I love this comic's concept, it has definitely been my least visited site out of all my comics. This for me has always been a shame. A few of my favorite jokes I've ever written are Words of Interest jokes! In the time of my hiatus I've brought prints of some of my favorite Words of Interest and ALT. comics to shows and people have liked them both equally. This for me is reaffirming, though raised questions for me as to why it's not as popular on the internet. After discussing with people here and there I've come to find that people don't even realize that Words of Interest is another L.A.W.L.S. comic. This led me to investigate as to why this may be the case. I began looking through my archives and realized a few things rather quickly. I believe a huge factor in this is that other than the Whale and Squid characters, there really is no L.A.W.L.S. "presence" in them. It dawned on me that I should perhaps add some of my more signature characters, namely Cadence and Autumn.

Example of an Elizabethan dress.

Researching the Era

Considering how much I enjoy the Victorian esthetic I figured this would be a fantastic opportunity to learn more about it and dabble in drawing my own versions of classic styles! I spent some time researching cool Victorian hats, dresses and other things from the time. I learned though that when you search the word Victorian on Google or any other search engine, you also find a lot of overlap in Elizabethan styles as well. Unfortunately I didn't realize this when I first drew Autumn. It was a reader on Facebook that call it to my attention. At first I was worried that this would be something that would ruin the concept, but after further consideration I realized that it didn't really seem to affect what I was going for for the art: the essence of class. So, I decided to go ahead and leave Autumn in a more Elizabethan style but made sure to draw Cadence in Victorian garb. This leads to an interesting side note. The style of dress I chose for Autumn ended up giving her a bit more of a Queen-esque feel, which I liked because I've called her the Goth Queen before.

Examples of Victorian dresses

Victorian hat references

One thing I learned from this research is that I really wish women still wore hats. Maybe not the Victorian styled hats, but there are plenty of elegant choices that I think look really pretty. Am I alone in thinking this? Would any of you ladies out there wear them if the modern fashion provided you with choices that fit what you were wearing? I'm sure there are modern hats out there... but when I've gone to hat stores looking for top hats and such, it seems like most of the women's hats are hats that would only look nice if you were wearing fancy dresses. Even then, I feel like you'd have to be going to an era theme party to wear them. I don't know, maybe I'm weird. Either way, because I liked the way a lot of the hats looked I decided also that I would give Cadence I super flowery and crazy looking one. 

Preview of an upcoming Words of Interest!

Looking Forward

Since I'm talking about Words of Interest so in depth, I'm sure you're wondering what you can look forward to with this project and when I plan to implement all of this. The newly updated Words of Interest will still feature a few comics with the two main Gentlemen I've been using thus far, but I will definitely be adding Cadence and Autumn. If people seem to take to the change well, possibly I'll add the betta fish or even Hatticus and other characters. Is there any particular characters you'd like to see Dapper'd up?  

This is also a good opportunity to announce that the next book I plan to release will very likely be a Words of Interest: Volume 1. The reason being, I will be posting a lot more of these comics while I continue working on L.A.W.L.S. Volume 2 behind the scenes as well as release new ALT comics (the main object here is to be able to make better comics for my readers, while actually being able to post content). There will be more information on this later though. Let's move on to what I'm sure most of you are interested in: when I'll start these comics again!

FERLY  (FER-lee) noun;Something unusual, strange, or causing wonder or terror.

FERLY  (FER-lee) noun;
Something unusual, strange, or causing wonder or terror.

To that I'm gonna say: I've been holding off on posting again until a few things line up. A major thing is the fact that I'm trying to figure out exactly how I'd like to deal with the whole website situation I am in. Up until now I've been hosting several sites for different comics and projects. Remember how I stated above that people didn't quite understand that Words of Interest is in fact part of the L.A.W.L.S. Universe? Well, I think one reason is that it had it's own site. I've recently decided as a way to lower the amount of maintenance I have to do, so that I can focus actual comics, is that I'd like to put all my comics in one place. I'm in talks with a programmer right now who's hopefully gonna help me develop a site that host all 3 comics in one place: L.A.W.L.S., ALT. and Words of Interest. Depending on what we are able to do, the comics are going to either be hosted here at Corvink or at a single L.A.W.L.S. domain. Do you have any opinions on this matter? Frankly it's gonna come down to what we're able to accomplish but I appreciate your opinions. I mean, you are in fact the reason I am doing this! Either way, I'm hoping that in the next few weeks him and I will be able to figure this out and I'll be able to update you all on which it's gonna be. Till then I will continue to post production blogs and post samples of things I'm working on over at the Corvink Facebook.

Source: http://lawls.co/2013/11/13/women-of-intere...