Devblog 27: Manga art
Hey all, it's Virt. As you probably know, I'm the main artist for FusionFall Legacy. In my devblog, I'm going to talk a bit about creating the manga. That's primarily because there's going to be a page released today!
Dogon's going to talk more about the writing in his devblog, and since I'm the artist, I'm going to talk about the art aspects of the manga.
Creating a manga is a lot of hard work. Because of this, drawing just one page can take a long time. The first thing I draw for a page doesn't tend to stay as the final version - plenty of revisions take place over the course of one page. I basically just redraw anything I feel doesn't work and try to make it show what I'm trying to display more clearly.
A lot of my inspirations for the manga come from typical shonen manga such as My Hero Academia and One Punch Man. I personally feel that the original FusionFall manga didn't follow many actual manga storytelling devices and was simply drawn in a style resembling manga. To me, creating the manga isn't just about drawing a black and white comic. There are a lot of specific elements of design that manga uses that are mostly unique to manga, so I'm trying to use some of those to enhance that manga feel.
That said, this is a relatively recent revelation. When I started, I did pretty much exactly what the original manga did, but while sticking closer to the style in the promotional art for the game. The shading was over complicated and the compositions weren't ultimately very interesting, to name a few things I think were wrong with the first few pages. (I still like how they turned out, mind you.)
More recently, I've been trying to be more accurate to the actual layout and styles of manga. There should be a very visible change in style in pages to come, and I hope you all will enjoy them.
The new page is on our manga site, but you can also see it here.
and Devblog 28: Dogon with a Devblog:
Hey guys! Dogon here with yet another devblog! I know a lot of you were expecting another devblog on world building, but we're saving some of those neat details for the live event! (Speaking of the live event, I've been pretty busy editing the whole thing together, so sorry if this devblog runs a little short!)
Instead of world building, I'm here to talk about the manga. Wait... a second manga devblog this week? Does that mean..?
I'm gonna talk about what goes in to writing a manga page, as well as how a page goes from an idea to text, and then from text to a finished page.
The manga script is where all of the magic happens. While Przzy may have taken over most of my duties when it comes to writing ingame missions, I'm still in charge of the overall story for FusionFall Legacy as well as the only writer for the Manga. As of this devblog I've written 9 chapters and planned out quite a few more. You can see a small snippet based on Today's page below.
I tend to leave my descriptions of what angles, objects, characters etc should actually be shown on the page fairly vague, as Virt has a better understanding of how to make things look good on paper. If I have a very specific way I want something to be shown, I make sure to include it in the script, and if Virt needs any extra info he'll let me know.
After reading through new chapters of the manga script our artist, Virt, tends to doodle various scenes out on paper during the day, and sends the sketches to the team later. Since there tends to be a long gap between writing the script and actually starting to work on a page, we use these doodles as concept art to remind us the tone we wanted for the page when it was written.
How many pages a chapter is isn't actually ever concrete. The previous page and this one were originally intended to be the same page, and in the first draft of the prologue the Eds didn't make a cameo at all! As Virt goes through the script, he'll sketch out the pages. From there we place page markers. A lot of times, he'll end up re-drawing the page at a later date with a more concrete design in mind.
Virt tends to include little jokes and doodles in the sketches when he draws them. He usually sketches the pages while sharing his screen, so that I (and anyone else on the FFL team who happens to be in call) can comment and make suggestions
Sorry for the page drought recently, but we've got a lot of fun stories planned, so we hope you're all hyped to continue reading the manga! You might even see a few characters in the manga first before we reveal that they're planned to be in the game, so keep an eye out!
I hope you guys are enjoying this week of devblogs which will extend well into the weekend (and probably even into next week!) , and I'll see you all at the FFL Live Event!
Looks like this week of devblogs will continue to next week! This will keep me busy...
-Plants10000
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