1-14 - Wanderer
Wednesday, February 21st, 2007- Commentary -
(J.D.’s mom walked into the room when we started to do the commentary.)
J.D. I just love the way Ranger looks in panel 1. He’s just beautiful that way.
Mom: Huh! I don’t understand the black panel.
J.D.: That’s a screenshot. That’s what you would see on your screen. The other panels are what it looks like inside the game.
Mom: Oh, okay! It’s very… interesting. “I just got killed by the Cat.” (laughs)
Craig: What do you think of the artwork?
Mom: I like it. It would look better in color. I don’t even know if that’s possible. You know, when I was young we didn’t have color. Everything was in black and white. Before high school everything was pretty monochromatic. Then we got color TV. I’m too old to go backwards.
Craig: You’re not old, mom!
J.D.: Actually, this isn’t in black and white. Everything in green tones.
Mom: What glasses are you wearing? It’s all in black and white!
J.D.: No, see, if you compare it to this one (shows Mom next page), see how it’s in shades of brown? (Flips back to this page) And this one’s in shades of green.
Mom: Oh… okay.
(Mom leaves the room)
J.D.: I love how you can already see what the Maintainer thinks of Leon, based on what he did to Leon’s last character, as observed by Wanderer.
Craig: Struck by lightning, banned for life.
J.D.: The “struck by lightning” is especially poignant because — obviously, if he’s going to ban him for life, why does he need to strike him with lightning? Except as a fit of temper.
Craig: Wanderer is of course an homage to Timo Pietila’s venerable string of characters from the newsgroup. This character is based on an early character dump Timo put up just before he started posting his amazing ironman wins. It was fun designing what a Dunada– excuse me — Westman ranger would look like. I believe you designed his cape, J.D.
J.D.: Yeah, I think I also did his hat.
Craig: The screenshot in panel 3 will be immediately familiar to players of ADOM. I decided to include a screenshot similar to a non-Angband roguelike game to emphasize that Mythband is –
J.D.: — not a direct rip of Angband?
Craig: (laughs) well, kind of. But more to point out that this a roguelike comic, not specifically an Angband comic. Things happen in Mythband that can’t happen in Angband.
J.D.: (laughs) I think that goes without saying! Poor Lucky. It is just not a good day to be Lucky.
Craig: Lucky’s day is about to get worse. But we’ll talk more about that shortly.
February 21st, 2007 at 3:17 am
The screenshot from ADOM looks out of place, IMHO. You might have been able to achieve the same affect by just modifying a screenshot of Angband - taking one straight from ADOM just seems a bit random to those who’ve played both games.
February 21st, 2007 at 10:35 am
I’ve played neither (I played Rogue early on, and then pretty much NetHack. I did fire up Moria once.) but having enough geek-cred, I recognized it as part of the family and that this was likely a town setting. I think it’s pretty easy to make the leap that this is in the family and will have similarities to all of the other family members.
February 21st, 2007 at 4:14 pm
I’ll go along with that. Having played both here (though never got far in ADOM due to not being able to deal with poison properly) I think it gives a “similar but not the same” feel to it.
February 23rd, 2007 at 1:35 am
I didn’t even notice that it wasn’t a *band town. I guess I figured, “Hey, I’ve seen enough town levels that I don’t need to squint at this one.” Looking at it now, I think it’s totally fine… ADOM town is cooler anyway, and I’m sure the Maintainer would have picked up on that =)
February 26th, 2007 at 12:27 am
I must admit… the capital T’s did through me off a bit. I was wondering if it was a Troll town or something…