Zoe the Vampire

So I’ve been talking a lot about how I am really banking on the game Dreams being something I can use to progress my art. I am putting a lot of faith in it being what it is advertising itself to be and really hope it is something I can fully embrace and get the most out of.

I am pretty sure that we will be getting a release date announcement by the end of the month (I am hoping for a late January release) and also a beta release (hoping the beta will start at the end of the month but might be as late as December, but they have already confirmed the beta will be out before years end).

So I thought I would put out there some of my hopes and plans for what I’ll do with the creation tools it has. I will separate them in different categories based on the likelyhood of being able to accomplish these things.

But first I want to preface it with a bit about what Dreams is for those that don’t follow gaming. Dreams is a game being made by Media Molecule, one of Sony’s first party studios. They are responsible for games like Little Big Planet and Tearaway, really inventive games that put a focus on players being able to create things. Dreams is basically a art studio, garage band style studio, and game engine all packaged within a game. With it you can create 3d models (the main thing I intend to use it for), music, and game code (super simplified but robust). Using these things you can do all sorts of things, make games is the main feature but it can be used for animation as well.

This is an image made completely in Dreams. It is this months cover of Gameinformer and they have been doing a bunch of features on the game gearing up for its release. This entire thing is 3d and they even in a video took the camera through it showing the depth and detail. Clearly there will be a learning curve and I don’t expect to be able to make something this good day one but I hope within a year from having it in my hands I could make things this good.

For comparison look at the first page of a comic I created a few years back, This Place Called Nowhere.

The comic was drawn by my friend Laura (who is 100 times better at drawing than myself) but she isn’t the most motivated and it started taking months between pages and eventually I just gave up on it, about a year ago I tried to find a new artist to handle it and had found one that was pretty close but the characters weren’t very lively and so I decided the time wasn’t right.

With Dreams I could get that soft ethereal look to the town and surrounding forest, and possibly even be able to make 3d models of the characters (that I’ve yet to be convinced on based on what has been shown, human like characters that don’t look like segmented rag dolls have yet to be shown to the public).

So my hope is that with the help of the dreams tools I could get TPCN back on track as well as bring some of my other projects that are in my head to paper.

SURE THINGS I COULD USE DREAMS FOR

1 Zoe has a background problem. I laze out and usually leave the backgrounds plain white because no one comes here for that, but it is very amateur. I would like to build Zoe’s house, street, school, and other key places in dreams and then when I need to use a location I set the camera where it needs to go and take a screenshot using the share button on the PS4. I then could take those screenshots and trace them to make more detailed and accurate backgrounds. Perspective is something I’ve always struggled with and it has a huge impact on my writing. There have been many times making Zoe that I go “this would be cool, but I don’t think I could handle the backgrounds”. Currently I am a bit overwhelmed because I want to incorporate Zoe’s school life but drawing hallways and lockers and doors and school desks and all those things, it can feel a bit daunting. Which makes my anxiety peak a bit and makes drawing a chore, which in turn slows the process down as well as hurts the quality. Dreams could easily fix this.

2 VIXI. There has been a very different vampire story I’ve wanted to tell for many years. First written in the last months of college VIXI is a very dark take on vampires. Not glamorous, very gory and unflinching. NO SPARKLING. I want to someday make it into a 4 part film series with the titles VIXI, BATHORY, HUNTER, and PLAGUE… But movies are very expensive. So I would really like to first create them as 4 graphic novels. Like mentioned above, I suck at perspective and there is no getting around it with this series. Most of the series would require backdrops like gothic cathedrals and dirty alleyways. With Dreams I would like to create massive backdrops and rudimentary character models and map out the entire thing in panels much like the Gameinformer cover. I’d then use that to trace the backgrounds in extreme detail with very stark lighting, the character models would be there so I could keep lighting accurate and “cheat” a bit to handle lighting that is a bit out of my skill level with really high contrast that still holds its 3 dimensionality. I don’t think dreams will be able to make realistic characters so I think I will be on my own there but I feel my ability is up to snuff in that area if need be.

POSSIBLES

3. If the character creation part is better than what has currently been shown I’d like to create a 3d version of Zoe. If that is possible then it opens a lot more doors. I could reboot the entire comic in 3d taking the constructive criticism you’ve all given these past few years to craft the best version of the comic. If this is possible then the update schedule might also be able to be increased because once I’ve built everything it would just be a matter of posing. The biggest hurdle with doing Zoe is the update schedule. I’ve prioritized stories that lead to sex scenes because doing arcs that don’t often can mean a month or 2 without any sex and that would be disaster for a porn comic. If I could double the output to 2 pages a week then I could see following some different paths that wouldn’t always be subtly contrived ways to getting to more fucking.

4. If the above turns out viable then that means I could also make animations. I’d love to make some Zoe sex gifs on par with those sfm overwatch things that are all over the place. Maybe even making longform animations of Zoe.

5. One of the main things I hope to be able to use Dreams for is making little animated movies. I’d like to make a youtube channel and do short 1-5 minute videos and hopefully build up a following there. When I started doing webcomics it was 1 part of a 2 part plan to kickstart my movie Where the Shadow’s Lie. The other part was a youtube channel. I made a pretty shitty review of a b movie in the style of so many other you tubers, but it felt to forced. I’m not a jokester and I don’t think my voice is really suited for narration. So I’d like to take some of the 100s of little ideas I have and animate them. When I started doing webcomics I had a comic series called Randomness that would be a good source for little stories. I also have ideas for a couple more in depth stories that I think have merit and have a more Tim Burton feel to them (early, good Tim Burton).

UNLIKELY

6. I’d love to make a RPG that plays like final fantasy 10. I really hate action rpgs. I wish they’d go back to giving you unlimited time to plan your move. To my knowledge there haven’t been any that have decent graphics besides FF10 done for the past 15 years or so, all the others like Octopath Traveller try to emulate 16bit graphics and are just massive walls of text you got to read. I want old school controls with modern graphics and production. So if the game creation aspect is as good and easy to understand as advertised then I wouldn’t mind in my spare time over the next couple years making a massive rpg. I’ve had a story for over 12 years that I’ve wanted to tell Called Twilight Knights about 3 teens that travel away from their little coastal town and get into the normal stuff that happens in these types of games, but would like a very different tone. I don’t like the melodrama that a lot of Japanese things seems to go for. Instead I would like a lot more aggression. It’s hard to explain without going into the story but basically there are some things I like about rpgs, but a lot more that I dislike and if Dreams is something I can use I wouldn’t mind building a game that takes what I like but doesn’t have the stuff I hate about rpgs.

7. finally if the animation stuff is robust enough I’d love to put together a 30 minute pilot for my show idea Monsterseekers. I did a terrible claymation for it back in college but had no idea how to do claymation and that shows. Also because I didn’t have much time and wanted it to be self contained it didn’t really have any characterization and I really want to expand it into something where you care about the characters. I really like Futurama and that would definitely be an influence for the tone and depth of characters.

Well if anyone sat through that whole thing I applaud you. I really just wanted to get my thoughts and hopes out there. I’ve been waiting for this game for 5 years now and the wait is almost over. almost all of Sony’s games have had their release date announced the same month that the game had a game informer cover, and there is a big game convention at the end of the month So I think in 4 weeks I’ll know a lot more about when it will be on store shelves. I can’t wait.