3-6 Clarifications
Saturday, August 4th, 2007– Commentary –
Craig: Have I picked my favorite page yet?
J.D.: I was wondering if you were going to say that again. I love the artwork in this page. Monsters are so much fun. The skeleton kobold in particular was a lot of work, but it was a lot of fun too, and I think it looks great.
Craig: It was really interesting to draw. I had to practice human skeletons for a while to get the basic form, and then figure out how a kobold would be different. They’re shorter, obviously, but they have that really interesting snout — and teeth.Â
J.D.: I really like his skull.
Craig: I read that D&D-style kobolds believe that they’re descended from dragons, so I added a few little horn-nubs on the back of the kobold’s skull, as though once its ancestors might have had mighty horns.
J.D.: I really like what you did with the spider too. That must have been difficult for you. That and the centipede, I mean, seeing as how much you despise “bugs”.
Craig: The worst part was studying pictures of wolf spiders magnified like a hundred times. It gave me the heebie-jeebies. I was so glad to be done with panel 3. :( Undead don’t bother me, but spiders? Eugh!
J.D.: I like spiders. If it weren’t for spiders, insects would take over the world. Spiders are your friends!
Craig: I can’t respond to that statement in an intelligent way.
J.D.: Well, as long as you can respect their function in nature, and not try and destroy them all on sight, I think we’ll call it even.
Craig: It was fun writing the script for this page too. The “guy gets sucked into a video game and has to win to survive” plot has been done before, and it was great fun watching Lucky and Leon work through that.Â
J.D.: For this page I wrote the runes for the magic spell phonetically instead of translating it directly from the English spelling.
Craig: So the runework in panel four —
J.D.: — says “Magic Missile” phonetically. So if you were to spell out what I wrote there, I think it’s “magik misel”. But seeing as I’m translating English words into an Elvish alphabet, I figured I could get away with doing some fancy phonetic footwork. 🙂
August 5th, 2007 at 5:19 am
Great work again, I do love this comic – Last panel confusion is priceless, I look forward to seeing how that pans out!
August 5th, 2007 at 7:57 pm
Unlike the food, it seems Leon has no problems with the magic potions inside Mythband.
August 6th, 2007 at 4:17 am
FAVORITE!
…okay seriously… I like it a LOT. I think that the interaction between Leon and Lucky the half-troll is just too hilarious. Great job on artwork and stuff here too, particularly the monsters. *two thumbs up*
August 6th, 2007 at 4:22 am
The artwork is very well done in this page, and it is a nice little montage of Lucky and Leon killing hoards of monsters while also holding a casual conversation. Not bad for someone who has recently died so many times in town!
Although, wasn’t meleeing floating eyes a bad idea? Or I am just thinking of Nethack?
August 6th, 2007 at 10:10 am
Well, I guess if the eye had paralyzed Lucky, Leon would have been able to help him… although of course, a really good teacher would let him die, there’s no lesson more valuable than being killed by a floating eye.
August 6th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
I think he should explain why it was a bad idea after saying “Nice hit.” This would make this great page even better 🙂
August 6th, 2007 at 10:53 pm
Good art. One observation makes me wonder:
I’ve never played an online *band before, so I might err here: since this system resembles a MMOband, shouldn’t the screen alerts mention who the message references? “Leon misses the Giant yellow centipede. Lucky hits the floating eye…” and the like?
And a second question: How does Mythband handle level transitions? Does it generate a new ‘level’ for each party? Does it follow Nethack’s path, with ‘static’ levels? Or does the game regenerate levels only after everyone has left them?
August 7th, 2007 at 7:03 pm
I love the spell Lucky does on this page. It has to be one of my favorite drawings.