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Announcing a new project |
If you look through this blog's archives, you may notice that although Free and Open Source Software is what I write most about, it is not the exclusive topic. I've written on science (my day job) as well as other interests. And today I'd like to lift the wraps on another project which I take part on, unrelated to the above.
Notice for those who read my blog coming from FOSS aggregators like Planet KDE: this is fairly different than most recent topics from me, so be warned before you continue reading.
It all began on a calm summer night 20 years ago
Sounds trite, isn't it? Except it's actually how it happened. I and my brother were having a walk one night and he mentioned having an idea about a story that he'd like written. So far I had a (limited) success in getting something decent on paper (or on stuff that never left my HDD), but I was steadily improving, therefore I was genuinely interested.
Inspired by some of the things we had read in those years (in particular the entire cycle of Conan by Robert E. Howard and horror stories by H.P. Lovecraft), he was thinking about a short story involving a werewolf, but was missing some key element. I commented, half-jokingly, that perhaps he should have added zombies to it (we had recently played a few titles in the arcades which involved said undead, like Data East's Night Slashers).
Know what? That was the missing piece he needed to get the story. As we walked back home, he was able to get all the plot out in some form. The following morning, he wrote it down not to forget anything. And that was the start of everything.
Funnily enough, the project I'm talking about here has only little relation with zombies and nothing with werewolves.
Early history
From that night, it took quite a while to get something done. And by quite a while I mean 10 years. As it was a fairly "spare time" idea, it would often be put in the back burner, or get ignored for months. After a few years, we also decided to move from our native language to English, which complicates matters (hint: a proper story is much more difficult to do than a blog post). And of course you have to consider "feature creep" (yes, that can happen with stories, too) and subsequent setbacks or cuts to make things more manageable.
In addition to all of this, during these developments we grew interested in what we called "illustrated novels", but better known as light novels in more recent years. In this context it means that narration is accompanied by a few artworks depicting key scenes. After some early attempts, a certain artist was contacted, and a number of artworks commissioned. The work was good, but delivery was incredibly slow and there were certain liberties taken in the design, liberties that were not fixed to prevent additional slowdowns. In the end, the artwork was massively beneficial for my motivation as I was finally able to finish the first part of the story. The whole thing was self-published for a while and put around freely (on a dedicated web page) under a very restrictive Creative Commons license as well.
Over the course of the following years, two more parts were made leveraging the same artist. Output didn't improve and the quality decreased, but in the end I was able to finish the rest, although with a great deal of difficulties. Thus the whole matter was done, finished.
Or was it?