Welcome back to WebUrbEx my Godot project where you explore the retro internet.

I very much dislike hot weather, and one of our latest “make the weather horrible each year” inventions has been a little something called generative AI. I also very much dislike generative AI, for a whole host of other reasons.

When WEX is released in… however many months’ time, I want to ship with Mod Support. Which is actually pretty easy as loading external assets has been in the game longer than loading internal assets. In other words I don’t have to do anything.

Well that’s not strictly true. I do need to tell people how to make sites.

A lot of this is already communicated on sites in the game, and I do want to keep up this diagetic tutorial + “piece together extra info” approach as I bring in EWB, the sequel to EWA, and its new features. But I know that’s not exactly rigourous and perfectly accessible, so I want to provide some out of game insight into how all of this works In Detail, but in terms of the technical side and more importantly the creative and design sides of things.

This is also where GenAI comes in. Or where it shouldn’t. I am fully aware that at some point someone is going to try making a mod for WEX that’s just copypasted slop and slop images (way to miss the point dude), so to try and discourage that before it happens, this blog post is going to be me documenting going through the process of working on one side story of the 2000-2001 storyline in the game, talking about the ideation, planning, writing process, design and integration into the greater narritive, teaching the tech side of creating sites for the game, and highlighting what it is that can be fun about the creative process. All the while begging you to not heat the planet up more so I can hopefully actually get work done in the summer heat by killing climate change.

Stealing ideas that don’t suck from your past self.

For about as long as I’ve been doing some form of gamedev I’ve always had a folder on each of my computers titled something like “ideas” or “plans” or to give one of my favourite ones: “parts of a thing”. I also tend to fill up my sketchbooks with character designs or notes on whatever I’m thinking. More or less most of it is absolutely unusuable, a huge portion of what’s left is “evidence that I was like this the whole time”, but a small fraction are ideas that I’ll fish out when I need something. That’s more or less how I ended up writing my radio plays Captain Dauntless and Absence, and where the idea for Carefully Altered Timelines came from. They all started out as “some idea” and when I needed an idea I went back to them and polished them up. So… moral of the story is just write down everything even if most of it is crap. Importantly if I thought of something before, that probably means I like it anyway so it’s always nice to get to use these ideas.

I need to create more sites for the 2000 storyline. Tabletop Story is slow to write, and while I have plans for a website for a cult I haven’t quite fleshed that one out. One of the hanging threads I do have open at the moment is that there are some commenters I’ve been using on the guestbook tab of Dervishi’s Palace that could have something going on. I decided to focus on HandKey, a character I’d established that was an isolated teen based somewhere in the rural US, but not much else about. I also knew I kinda wanted to try and make a comic site on EWA despite the hard image cap of 256, just to show how it could be done. As always I also want to see if I could find something I’d made art for years ago, so I could squeeze another distinct style out of my artistic repertoire. By breaking down where, how and why an idea has to fit in to what you’re working on, that’s super helpful with choosing (or coming up with) an idea that’s cromulent.

I vaguely remembered at some point as a teenager coming up with the idea of a comic about two robots on a ship travelling (in real time) to proxima centuri, waking up a minute every day for a brief conversation with each other, which I’d then post on facebook. I didn’t remember getting very far with it, but it seemed like an idea worth scavenging for this site so i went on my old hard drive and found it in a folder marked Journey. Saves me coming up with a name now. Importantly the old sprites I made for it initially were still around and look just enough different from how I’d sprite now that I can give them a pass of “probably distinct enough” next to the pixel art on the Tensor Knight advert site.

I’ve seen tools that claim to provide help with “the ideating process” before but I hope I’ve demonstrated the value in using your own ideas, and how finding a suitable idea is more just thinking about what you need than just throwing ideas at the wall.

Plans and Research

Now that I had my idea I got up to scheming. As I’ve noted the original idea for the story was based on the idea of the robots being on a trip to Proxima Centuri, travel times to which could take from decades to centuries. I’d like to give HandKey as a character a little more credit for working out how much of a commitment that would be, and decided that maybe I should make it a “much shorter timespan” idea both because that seems more realistic for someone to commit to (there’s a reason I dropped the original comic in the first place) and because it’d be nice if the first “comic” in weburbex wasn’t deliberately chosen to be unfinishable. I remembered the Mars Exploration Rover (Opportunity/Spirit) missions were launched in probably the 00s so maybe they could have been an in-universe inspiration for HandKey? It’s quite possible the choice of two robots in my original idea was inspired by them. So I did a google date-range search for “Mars Exploration Rover” from 2000 backwards and found an article from July 2000 talking about NASA’s plans to land a rover on mars in 2004 (just the one?), and another article from October of the same year talking about how the fact it was 2 rovers had been “Previously announced”. The first article also explicitly states that the rover(s) would spend 7 1/2 months travelling to Mars. Now that’s a much more reasonable timescale, fitting mostly within the first year of the game’s storyline (with some bleed over into the era of the upcoming Easy Web Board software but not enough that it seems egregious that HandKey wouldn’t switch over). So, with some research and a lot more critical thinking than I had back in 2014, I put together a quick doc detailing my design plan for Journey as a comic within WebUrbEx: “made by the character HandKey, inspired by the mars rover missions that had recently been announced, 7 1/2 months of daily (?) “comics”, surprisingly just within the EWA hard image cap too. Assuming I spend half an hour on each page, that also means it would take me about 120 hours of work which can be done in the background during development of other things.

Was it necessary to dive down a rabbit hole of looking up what was the most topical space missions were at the time? Yes, because it made the idea for the comic significantly less stupid, but also Yes(2.0) because if someone else decides to look it up, they’ll be like “oh yeah that makes sense”. Also Yes(with a vengence) because it was interesting finding that out, and it’s probably clear from all of that why I came up with the idea of making a game about looking at old websites. Please tell me you understand why this is fun and it’s not just me?

I had to sort through the timeline of the game and plan to connect this to the existing game. I knew I wanted the comic to use EWA-G 1.1, so I could have timestamped comments, and that meant it would have to be made in late august at the earliest (about the right time anyway, going off of the articles). This also put it at about the same time that

1. The people who made EWA tell the woman who made EWA-G to cease and desist distributing it
2. A bit after the latest article I’d written for Dervishi’s Palace

This opened up the opportunity of writing a blog on Dervishi’s Palace that would inspire HandKey to go through with setting up the site, have Lis help him with it for the initial setup just before the takedown notice, and maybe have some of her guestbook commenters come over with him as she goes dormant after that. Helping tie the sites together. So that creates more (small) tasks for me to do while setting it up. Which is good, getting them out of the way helps build up momentum.

Small tasks that build momentum

So I decided to add a blog post to Dervishi’s site mentioning the two other EWA-G sites I have planned, the reference docs for HORRF (the game the lads play for the Tabletop Story site), and BoomTown, a blog for a game developer (that gets updated to EWB, so I don’t have to make that at this stage in production). Then off the back of that I add in comments in the guestbook where HandKey asks how to set up a site, and Dervishi talks him through it (with some delay to indicate that they’re working in different timezones and communicating without any notifications, just checking the guestbook every so often), I then plan to continue the conversation on Journey’s website.

Then I get distracted writing the storm of comments of support from Dervishi’s community around EWA-G getting taken down, and some hits at her and the EWA creators being in talks. More or less finishing off the storyline for Dervishi’s blog, aside from the perl tutorials which I still have left to work out… If nothing else I’m being productive.

Because I want to try and use more Original Primative Matt Pixel Art for the comic to keep up that art style, I decide to dig open one of the first game projects I made in unity, a 2D platformer called Morf. What is Morf about? That’s not important.

Most of them are not usable because Morf was set in an underwater city, but I think I can recolour the ones that exist, or reference them, when making assets for Journey. I’ll probably also pull some sprites from RCG, because that was still in my teenage era of pixel art. I don’t know how to succinctly describe how it’s materially different from my modern stuff, but it feels different enough, and end of the day if I were to work with an artist to upgrade anything it’d be the new stuff because barely any of it is in the game. Literally this one image.

That’s an awful lot of the creative process being spent not working on the site?

Yes, I’m having fun. isn’t that the point?

OK then, fine. From my previous experience being a teenager making a bad webcomic, the best way to be a teenager making a bad webcomic is to plan out roughly what the story is, kinda work out what the chapters are, and then spend every evening on your upload schedule frantically making something up to be the page you’re supposed to post. As the original story pitch I grabbed off my old hard drive says:

the idea behind journey is that there are 2 childlike AI robots sent on a ship to [revised to be mars], sol and luna. they activate them for a pre-programmed amount of time a day (increasing as they get closer to their destination) to learn and interact with each other. this allows for a strip a day sprite comic with no difference between webcomic time and irl time.

characters:
Sol: an android, meek to start with but his character ark will lead him to develop confidence, and partial overconfidence. as soon as he gains his space legs he’s ready to rush into anything without looking before he leaps. and afraid of the dark.
Luna: a gynoid, who is similarly meek to her shipmate to begin with, inquisitive she wants to learn more about the universe leading to her leaving her social skills rusty, along with arrogance about her ideas being infallable.

So, that gives us some character “arks” to begin with. The first couple strips should probably focus on introducing the premise, characters, and how they differentiate from each other.

As for the base I need to pull in a template for EWA-G, and fill in the details with the details for the site. I do not have a template for EWA-G, so I just took Dervishi’s blog, copied it, deleted everything out of it, and got customising. I wanted to give the comic an unused stock background instead of one of Dervishi’s so I picked the EWA “Coral” background, as it’s orange so I figure HandKey might have thought to looked marsy? I mostly left the other settings the same other than changing the archive order to Ascending, matching how comic archives tend to start at 0 and scroll down.

oh by the way I added the tld “.gb” to most of the sites in the game, because it’s a tld that’s apparently gaurunteed to be unused by the IEEE, since the uk uses uk and guinae-bissau uses .gw.

After being a bit embarassed in discovering some of the shape tools I used for Horde of the Abyssal Lord were added to paint with the Ribbon UI (Vista or 7? I don’t know I’ve never used Vista), and having to redo all that, I decided to go hunting old versions of windows in my loft. I found out 98’s font selecter doesn’t work on modern windows, and not much seems to have changed between 98 and XP, so XP Paint is going to cut it. It also supports jpeg and png out of the box rather than needing to mess around with era appropriate tools Imaging for Windows/GIMP. Yeah, I went down another rabbithole reading about how to save things as a png on windows 98, it’s OK, I can write stuff based on that.

JUST MAKE THE COMIC!

yeah ok, ok.

Take the 2 sprites I drew for the main characters, drag them into paint XP, write some text in an era appropriate font (tahoma), save as bmp (for full resolution version), save as jpg (I assume paintxp uses similar default quality settings to Imaging for Windows?).

I was kinda happy with it until I started messing around in windows 98 and discovered a couple things: 1) the default font is ms system sans, 2) truecolour support was a lot more patchy back then than it would be from XP onwards. I haven’t been thinking about colour spaces since I started this project, and more or less I would expect most of the characters involved in the story to have access to fairly modern/powerful hardware for the time, simply by virtue of people who hang around on the internet being tech savvy or tech interested. But considering HandKey is supposed to be some guy trapped out in nowhereland, america, it almost makes sense he’d be a little bit behind on that. So, I kinda want to play into that “a bit behind” aspect and imply he doesn’t have access to all that great hardware, at least at first.

TrueColour 24 bit:

256 colour bitmap:

16 colour bitmap:

I still think the self-selection bias would imply that HandKey would have access to not completely stock ancient drivers, so 256 colour seems like something that subtly implies it.

So I drag it into 256 colours, redo the font to remove aliasing

And save as a jpeg again

Actually this talk of colour spaces and OSes has kinda got me thinking. For the most part I’ve been assuming that the various characters are using Windows 9X or its contemporaries, but we’re getting up to the point in history where Windows ME and Windows 2000 were on the market… So maybe at some point later I should imply that HandKey’s family upgraded their pc? or maybe not. I do imply that his dad uses their pc to browse his digital photographs, hence him having a bmp to jpeg tool, so maybe they are slightly more tech turned on than you’d expect of people living somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Melissa on the other hand would probably be kept at the bleeding edge of business by force considering she share’s her mother’s PC and her mother is a high level government employee of some description. So it’ll be fun seeing her forced onto Win2000 and as an extension Windows NT for the first time.

I then spent a couple days (after weeks of working on something else) putting together both comics and colour commentary and “suggestions as to why the comic improves” in the site’s guestbook file.

[post]
[handle]EvelynGotLucky
[timestamp]4/9/2000
I have a recommendation. It’s more natural if the speech bubbles match the side with the characters on
[/post]

[post]
[handle]HandKey
[timestamp]4/9/2000
i know but it’s hard to have them be in the right order then
[/post]

[post]
[handle]EvelynGotLucky
[timestamp]4/9/2000
yeah it’s difficult. You could try rearranging the characters to be on different sides.
[/post]

I realised I rather like the room for including the quiet moments that having these two characters alone in space kinda naturally leads to. How there’s a room for gag a day stuff, but also some room for more philosophical moments, as well as hints at HandKey’s anxieties about

As the comic goes on I have a couple of other characters to add into the mix but for now having 3-6 active commenters + HandKey himself seemed like a nice group to write for at the moment.

Limitation breeds frustration

Continuing to make this comic in old versions of Paint with these old tiny sprites has started to get on my nerves. There isn’t much room for text (though I’m getting better at working with what space there is) but the character sprites wouldn’t fit into larger comics. As I’m continuing on, and not immediately, but at some point in the future, I want to revisit and redraw the sprites at a larger scale. I also want to try and contrive a story reason for HandKey to be able to upload in png because I can’t imagine he’d be happy with this quality drop. You have to keep in mind when making retro things set contemporary to the era they’er aping that people weren’t going for that style, they were always striving against their limitations and you work should reflect that.

As the guestbook grew in size I also realised how important the board part of EWB is going to be in making it easier to navigate, as well as the fact that I do need a search function (ctrl+f) to allow people to find comments in these EWA-G sites’ guestbooks as they get bigger.

Oh and also I found out halfway through working on this that WEX doesn’t check for the capitalised JPG extension that my workflow was saving in, so I updated it to allow for “JPG, JPEG and PNG” on top of the all lowercase variants. Good catch. I should definitely do the same when implementing gif support with Godot Gif, which I have added in to the project now after updating to 4.4, which somehow caused No Bugs!!! very happy with that. Can’t believe I was putting that off so long.

Furthermore because of issues with actually reading the comic in the window, I decided to add in a Zoom menu to the browser that scaled images, and in the future when I implement it will scale text too.

Now what?

After making 19 strips I more or less realised that waiting until I’d finished this to make the blog post would make it almost impossible to get this out as a devlog before I had to start focusing on launch hype, so I figure this is a good point to leave it. It also means that there’ll still be 200-odd comics and 7 months for you to explore on the site when it goes live. I’ve deliberately selected a mish mash of seperate ones on this post to make sure it’s still worth reading the whole way through, even the early stuff.

As you can see my creative process is very research heavy (and tangent heavy). This is likely a result of two things: Autism and ADHD. The latter is also why I’m focusing so much on the writing and art for things so I don’t keep on putting that off. I don’t expect most people’s creative process to look that similar to mine (unless you’re super cool and sexy and also have AuDHD). This being said, I do hope I’ve illustrated the importance of involving yourself in researching, ideating, integrating and struggling to create something. How immersing yourself in the process can help develop an idea to fit your needs and change into something far greater than what you had in your head or on the page, something more a part of a cohesive whole, and in writing something that adapts or reacts to the environment it’s made in, especially as something serial. How it helps uncover ideas that can expand on the rest of the work, or develop other ideas and characters at the same time, and in general contribute to the joy of learning

I know a lot of the downsides of Generative “AI”/Slop machines are easy to ignore if you just want to use them, but I hope I’ve made a good argument as to the upsides of why you should want to make something yourself. What it can do for your work, what it can do for you and just how much there is to get out of it, educationally, enjoyment and satisfaction. And also it can help you figure out stuff about your project as you go along.

Any other AOB?

Me and my friend are working on the website to advertise WebUrbEx. It’s not ready yet but we have a fair bit of the pages worked on so far, and at the moment are putting together some nice scuffed fake banner adverts. Fun fact, neocities won’t display anything in a folder called “ads”. Based.

I’m also working on a timeline for release. While I don’t want to make any more broken promises about that, I have a particular date in mind and have spreadsheeted out when work needs to be done for to be done by then.

Dragged kicking and screaming, bagged and gowned

-Matt