Spoiler
Here we have the original sketches of all the characters. I have a few pages of notes outlining how to recruit different people and stuff, but this sheet was the most important one when I was planning the reboot.
That's definitely not the original drawing of Swabi. I'd guess he was originally drawn digitally, but he might have first appeared in a math notebook or something. You know how that works.
"Fearless Malcolm Haberdashing" was one of the original name suggestions.
Mopples was also one of the original name suggestions. In the original adventure, I used it as the name of your mop. Which was the first crew member recruited.
I forgot to draw CJ's sword. It was a rapier.
In a lot of the original dialogue people used short forms of each others names. But they're already nicknames, so I dropped that in the reboot.
Nailz's hair was originally brown. When I drew him in the reboot I didn't like the brown edge of it, so I left it white to blend in or something.
In my notes I had a location where everyone could be found. Sharkbait just says "SharkBait will occasionally appear in the background of scenes. This will never be explained"
I couldn't figure out how to make that work in the reboot, so instead I just dropped the character, since he wasn't relevant.
When Bob suggested asking the Mysterious Stranger, I had no idea what he meant, so I thought it'd be a great opportunity to reintroduce Sharkbait.
The basic premise of this is meant to be one of those classic point and click adventures, where you get one thing which lets you get another, which lets you go to a place, where you find something else and then you trade it for.. yadda yadda, until you have the one thing you actually need, and then you win the game.
It's also heavily influenced by Radiata Stories, which if you don't know is a PS2 JRPG where almost all the regular townsfolk npc's can be recruited to join your party (in which they fight to the death for you. I always found it funny how such a simple favour can get people to risk their lives fighting dragons) It's an awesome game. go play it.
The characters of the Ocean appeared in my "
Night of the Abandoned" comic, which involved characters from abandoned adventures coming to life and seeking revenge upon me.
Swabi, Cannon Fodder, and Nailz attacked me in it as shown in the image below.
I was really looking forward to writing trivia and posting concept art for this adventure
The art style I developed specifically for this adventure is based on standard lined paper, where the head is two lines tall, and the body+legs are two lines tall. The eyes are meant to rest just on the underside of the head's halfway point.
I didn't keep to this perfectly in the reboot.
Melons was meant to be recruited by showing her you've recruited Squirt, and her insisting to come along to keep him safe. The Hobo (as my original notes refer to him) was to be recruited after Melons was in your party.
These where the only two recruitments that I modified for the reboot, based on suggestions.
There are a staggering amount of things in this comic that I find completely hilarious, despite probably not being funny to anyone but me.
In the original adventure the first person that Swabi attempted to recruit was Cannon Fodder. I developed the other character recruitments around having Cannon Fodder be the last character recruited, based on the classic game structure mentioned before.
I forgot to save the mega cannon ball as a sprite.
There is no oder to these trivia pieces what so ever
Unless you count, 'order they come to my mind'
In the final group shot (the one with CJ in the shot) Nailz is facing the wrong way.
Considering how happy everyone looks, it would imply that Captain Jane is actually a great captain and they have no reason to want to rebel.
Sprite based comics are super fun, since it never feels like work (except when making a new sprite/background)
Oh! How about I say the order I drew the sprites in!
I started typing that out, but it got long and confusing, never mind.
I've always thought that adventures where movement is constrained to a single location, like a complex are really good from a writing standpoint.
Alanna is a great example of this.
This is the first time where I've had an exact plan for everything happening in the adventure. The only puzzle I didn't have an answer planned for was how to 'soup up' the cannon balls.
This is getting long and rambley, so I'm going to stop and spoiler it.