A Discussion about SkyHorn

Seven months ago I started posting pics, and then pages, of SkyHorn Island, with a down-to-earth reason: I wanted to make a game about a crew of ordinary anthros castaway on an island of mythological anthros and learning their magic to progress the story.

But I had zero experience in coding, I bought an Udemy course “for beginners” about Unity, and discovered that “for beginners” didn’t mean zero experience.

So I went on with the webcomic medium on a rebound, but I enjoy it a lot and made me grow as an artist and writer in a very short period of time. The voting system helps me getting a lot of feedback and more than once the story took unexpected routes because of your choices.

But a few days ago a follower on twitter informed me that there are a lot of very affordable and simple tools for building RPGs and visual novels and making of this story an actual game. The idea has been stuck in my head since then, because of various reasons.

1. Games are a hotter market than comics. Period.
2. It’s incredible how much you can get away with written narration instead of visual narration  in visual novels. I always try to keep the area covered by speech  bubbles on the page at a minimum, and sometimes I had to cut some  relevant information or recaps that could be useful to the reader.
3. The voting system always disappoints people that voted for the alternative that didn’t succeed. Maybe some of my ex patrons unsubscribed after three or four times their favorite alternative didn’t succeed.

There are some advantages as well with the play-comic format. Mainly that I can manipulate stories and designs along the way, especially with unexpected choices from you. A comic is about the quality of the story and the art.

While a visual novel would be more about the variety of the routes. Do you want to know how the story would have turned out if Kondar the Orc chose to take the route to the plain of the centaurs, instead of meeting the feral cavemen? What if you decided to start the story from the PoV of the human? With a visual novel, you would have that.

So… yeah. I’m torn about that. I can barely keep a regular schedule for the comic, and it would be really difficult to cut out time even for learning to build a visual novel.

Maybe I could, for a while, lower the number of updates of the comic to one page per week, building the game, and in the meanwhile still gratifying you with art requests and artworks that will feature in the game.

Let’s test the waters with this pool. I’m open to other suggestions as well. Please comment