The logjam is broken; I have produced the next page of the story. It seems I have not lost my touch after all this time.
The story is still set to resume on February 26th. I will continue to compose pages so that I have a workable backlog to keep posting on a regular schedule. I ran myself dry and ragged last time and don’t want to repeat this mistake.
I can’t discuss too much of what is going on behind the scenes without giving spoilers, but in general, there are three projects that need to be done for the story to fully move on to its next phase, and I have completed one of them so far.
This first project was the background work necessary to portray the new page that I just made. I have mentioned before that Botaram is somewhat analogous in presentation to a puppet show, with the shapes and characters on invisible supports. Some scenes only require some ground under their feet and some mountains in the distance, and I simply call this a background. When I render the background of the world in deeper detail so that the characters may interact with it, I call that a ‘set’. Over time, the sets have dramatically grown in complexity as I create more details about the world and strive to keep the art varied and interesting within its constraints. The first two of the three projects involve building sets where the story will happen next.
The third project is on track due to the skills, help and encouragement of my partner Hamachisn’t, and it will form part of the backbone of the story’s next major segment.
Apart from these concerns, there are a few technical issues relating to how the comic will be presented henceforth. The story got its start in GIF format, with images 530 pixels wide due to the space constraints of my old art blog, pageatatime.com. Times have changed, and I plan to upgrade the graphics and resolution as well with a move to SVG format. None of these details will stop the story from moving forward.
That’s all I have to report for now, I will provide additional status updates when there is more to say. Thank you very much for reading!