Chapter 4: Page 80
Hello and welcome back to Beyond the Western Deep! We hope you had a wonderful holiday season and the new year is treating you all right!
We’d be lying if we said our months-long hiatus was part of the plan. Some years the holiday glut is a bit more glut-like than other years. This year was perhaps the worst we’ve seen in terms of siphoning Rachel’s considerable artistic powers, but we’ve tried to keep things moving with the release of Wintersdawn in the Deep on Steam, our short story collection Tales from the Spire: Volume One, the Music of the Western Deep Kickstarter album (which is coming along nicely!), preparing to launch our Kickstarter for Volume 3, and the development a much larger video game follow-up to Wintersdawn that we are in active development on right now.
The game features adventure-style exploration…
Yup, we’re aiming for a full game in a comic-accurate style that employs the incredible talents of Knights of the Light Table (the same studio that did our Volume 2 Kickstarter animation).
We don’t have much else to announce regarding this title other than that I’m working on it and we’ve made some incredible progress on it in the last year-plus.
ANYWAY! Onto the page!
As always, Rachel completely knocks the expression game out of the park, which is particularly important in this scene–laced with subtext and suspicion as it is. Crim may have a personal beef with Quinlan and may not particularly care for Dakkan, but he takes his position as a defender of the Western Deep very seriously and knows how important their mission to the north was.
The tension, as they say, is palpable!
Thank you all so much for your patience these last few months. It’s been a tough Q4 and things have been very slow spinning up this month, but we’re excited to be moving forward on a number of exciting Western Deep-related projects.
In the meantime, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @thewesterndeep for news and updates beyond the posts here!
holy CRAP! Those little snippets of animation look incredible! SO excited to see more!
Shouldn’t Dakkan have a bandage around his right arm?
He’s already recovered since the last page
Ha! Good catch :) Dakkan’s got the bandage now!
“Ouch” again for dakk x3
Just…. Finally. That’s enough for me. Finally. Thank you <3 .
Regarding the next game, what will be the minimum system requirements? The same as Wintersdawn in the Deep, or more?
They’ll likely be more than Wintersdawn in the Deep, because the number of assets we’ll be loading at any given time will be increased, and the space required is expected to be greater by a fair margin because of increased scene count, animation and sprite count, and audio.
We’re a LOOOONG way away from final numbers on anything, though!
As it stands now, how long do you think the new game will be compared to the first one?
Given the graphical upgrade over the last game? Ya may need a little bit more processing and GPU horsepower to run right.
Well, he’s not immediately arresting them as traitors, which is a good sign.
Oh gosh, the suspense is killing meeee ;;
It must be so cooool to see your world come to animated life. That is some slick animation. Quick! Stab him while he’s tapping his shield!
Hey Alex Rachel and Jerome. I’d like to make my own webcomic so I’d like to ask you some questions.
1 how did you make your website and is the program thanks to which you created it free? if not do you know any free alternatives?
2 how do you know how many people follow your comic?
3 Do you have any tips for world building and story writing?
4 what can I do to get the first readers? how to promote my comic?
Sorry for any possible spelling errors. English is not my native language
Hi Pevel! I’ll do my best to answer these :)
1.) We went with WordPress and the ComicPress/ComicEasel template. It’s free, save for the hosting and domain fees of course–but it’s nice to have our own URL and freedom over the template. For 100% free comic uploads, Webtoon is pretty much the go-to these days, but their “waterfall” format doesn’t really work with Western Deep, so we’ve stopped posting there for the moment.
2.) Because we have our own website, we can use Google Analytics to track our unique visitor counts, just like any other website!
3.) General tips, eh? Well, keep in mind this is only one perspective, and plenty of other folks have had tremendous success going about things their own way. But when I started out writing, I was very much about fleshing out every single element of a world–every single detail. The problem was that I never actually got around to writing anything! When I shifted my day job to Guild Wars, I was encouraged to plot stories from the characters’ perspective, because that’s the part the readers/players/viewers will connect with the most. Once I started doing that, I found it a lot easier to find the worldbuilding elements that were actually important to my stories, and focus on those before anything else. But of course, that’s just me :)
4.) Social media is a good bet these days! Promote your work with the appropriate webcomic hashtags and your readers will start to find you. Post it up on r/webcomics and r/comics on Reddit (something I need to get better at doing on the regular myself), just get it out there, and if you’re consistently posting it up, the audience will find it.
Best of luck, Pevel! And thank you for reading :)