The state of affairs (Part 3)

This concludes my musings (ramblings?) about the state of Robomeks so far, where it comes from and where it can go from now on.

So now what?

As I mentioned at the previous post I’ve been revising the original treatment for Robomeks. That has lead to some changes. Some minor, some significant.

The story arch will be shorter. The sixth chapter, which was related to the second chapter and that, in fact, was the seed for a possible sequel, is cut out. The same happens with the fifth. This one has been cut because it had no relevance at all with the story arch. The ninth and tenth chapters have been merged. That’s all for the cuts. Now the additions.

There was going to be an additional twelfth chapter that acted as epilogue and originally didn’t affected the main story arch. Now, this chapter has been officially added to the arch. So, the original eleven (plus epilogue) chapters have changed to nine.

And the last change: The first three chapters already published will be treated as a big prologue to the official start of the story arch. So they’re inside the story line but they’re now tagged as non-essential.

In short, the official story arch will be six chapters long now, starting from the fourth published chapter.

You’re probably confused by now, which is OK. Let me just clarify that nothing important has changed. The story arch is basically the same. I just speed up some key moments and cut out some fat that didn’t contribute to tell the story. It should be tighter and more interesting now. And the best part, you’ll never notice the difference.

Most of the chapters have also been reworked to fit the tone better. I’m not totally happy yet, so the treatment revision isn’t over while I’m writing this. I just don’t want to mess it up again in the script process. Once I’m happy with the treatment I’ll do the story-boards.

I also have yet to decide about the page format, storytelling pace and all the things I worried about in the last post. Those are things that can have a heavy impact in RM and I should think carefully before doing anything I may regret.

One thing that will change most likely is the length of each chapter, and even the concept of chapters themselves. While the arbitrary decision of each chapter being twenty-four pages long helps keep things tight and encourages some kind of synthesis, the length itself is just unimportant since this isn’t a comic-book series after all. So, each chapter will have a variable amount of pages that will be determined by the story to be told in that segment. If it needs more, it will have more, if it doesn’t, it will have fewer.

And now, something completely different

While I’ve made, and I’m still making, lots of mistakes I think there’s some positives to look at.

The art has been improving. Right now I couldn’t tell apart a page from Robomeks (done totally in a digital way) from a hand made page by myself. That’s quite an achievement for me. That also means that what you’re seeing now are probably my drawing skill limits. For good or for bad I can’t do it better.

I’ve also managed to keep a reasonable art level with an extremely fast working pace (six pages a week until December). Which is also quite nice.

I’m not that happy with the color of the last chapters, though. That’s something I must work at, definitely.

Concluding

The funny thing is that one thing is theory and another one is practice. While I think I’ve spotted some mistakes I’m not sure if I’ll be able to fix them. Or have the will to do so. Maybe I’ve even spooted the wrong ones. So, I don’t know how this is going to end. But it’ll end, that’s for sure. One way or another.