So, what’s been up with Vision Riders lately? This is an excellent question. There’s a lot I’ve been meaning to write about for the past year but keep putting off because of life and just plain uncertainty. But now’s a good time to share some of this stuff, so I figure I might as well just dive in.
First off, the major news. Vision Riders Entertainment, as a Texas corporation, was dissolved on November 27th of last year. This means that I can no longer put that nifty little “Inc.” at the end of its name. To me this was sort of the end of an era. I’d put a lot of work into Vision Riders but never got any of the animation it was created for off the ground, and I wasn’t getting any freelance work. The past six years have been very demoralizing and stressful, and a lot of the time it’s hard not to feel like a failure. But it looks like the roller coaster ride isn’t quite over yet, and things may actually be looking up for a change!
I’ll likely be reforming Vision Riders as a limited liability corporation here in Kentucky for the release of Junction. From there the fate of the company (and, by extension, my career) as well as the direction it takes, if any, will be very much dependent on how the game performs. If it tallies around $10,000 to $15,000 in sales, though that may not sound like much I’d have enough to get by for a year while I work on another game or other project. Anything below that I might still be able to keep going, but I’d have to start getting freelance work again to make it pan out. More likely I’d be closing up shop and looking for a more permanent job, possibly in a different career considering the state of the industry and the economy.
So that’s where things stand, in a nutshell. But you may also be wondering what’s up with some of my older projects and what happened to them, so I think it’d be prudent of me to list them and explain their individual fates.
SWORDMASTER ODYSSEY
Other than Junction, this is the project most people are likely to wonder about. For those who aren’t familiar with it, Swordmaster Odyssey is the webcomic that launched when Vision Riders first went live. For a long time, people assumed that it was all I worked on, but it was really meant to just be a side project, something that would go up every Friday to keep people coming back between animation releases.
Unfortunately, the webcomic became a huge timesink and was hindering more than helping. Despite nearly 200 pages of story and effort it never brought in any income and never managed to really stand out or bring in a real audience. Transitioning the webcomic to full color increased the workload and ended up killing it.
I’m not sure what to do with it, honestly. I hate to leave the story hanging, but there’s only a handful of people who were following it and, to tell the truth, although I love the characters I never really was attached to the story. When/if I do continue it, the story is likely to get truncated compared to the original concept.
THE LAST PRINCESS
I’m not sure if I ever talked about this project on the blog, but this was one of my earliest attempts to get an online animated series for Vision Riders. The story centered around the violent overthrow of a monarchy and an old general’s attempts to get the last heir to throne–the titular princess–out of the country to safety. Along the way a young thief ends up tagging along with them and, while hiding out in a little rural town outside the capital, they contemplate the impact and future of their country’s now-fledgling democracy, all the while doing their best to evade capture by the new government’s agents who fear that old loyalists will use the princess as a pawn to rekindle the civil war.
Despite the fact there were only three or four reoccurring characters and episodes were meant to only be about six minutes in length, it was still an ambitious project and I just couldn’t manage to get it off the ground. Some hand-drawn animation was completed, the opening was composed and storyboarded, and most of the first episode was scripted, but it never went anywhere and I finally gave up on it.
Of all my projects, this is probably the one I am most desperate to revisit one day. I’m still sad it never went anywhere.
PROCYON
I think this was the first animated project I announced publicly. There were a few ideas that I had after canning The Last Princess, but this was the first one to actually take root. I decided to center the story around only two characters this time, both male so I could provide all the voices. The general concept was that these two, a hardy construction worker and a teenage boy, were the survivors of mankind’s first attempt to colonize the Procyon system. But their craft failed in the atmosphere, killing most of the tens of thousands of people on board, and they ended up on a planet inhabited by fierce beasts with no way to communicate with Earth, no way back, and a humanity that had not yet mastered faster-than-light travel.
By the way, this was supposed to be a lighthearted comedy-drama. Yeah.
From the get-go Procyon was plagued by issue after issue. I decided to put it into production before thinking too much about it, hoping to “force” it done like I’d gotten Swordmaster Odyssey going before it (which is why that story is also subpar, in my opinion). But I couldn’t get the story to work, I couldn’t get the characters to look right, I couldn’t get my computer to cooperate, I ran out of room on my hard drive and couldn’t afford an upgrade at the time–things just kept getting worse and worse. A lot of hand-drawn animation was completed and I was maybe halfway done with the first five-minute episode, but I finally just gave up.
After the failure of Procyon I became more careful about the projects I chose. I’ll probably not revisit this idea ever again, but if I do it’s more likely to be in a different medium.
MY BROTHER
After Procyon I gave up on doing a series for the time being and decided to do a one-shot short. By this point Vision Riders was circling the drain and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do anymore, so it was largely conceived as something to show prospective employers. The animatic was completed (it can be viewed here on Vision Rider’s YouTube channel) and I even put up a site for it.
Unfortunately, at this point real life threw me yet another unexpected curve ball and, after just a couple shots were animated, I was too worn out to continue with animation anymore and called it quits. I would like to go back an finish it one day, but it won’t be anytime soon.
UNDER A DIFFERENT MOON
This project actually predates Vision Riders by some ten years. A few people have mistaken it for a future webcomic, but in fact it is a novel that I planned to put up as a “web serial”, adding a new chapter every week or two. The story itself is finished, but I could never get it the way I wanted it and so it keeps getting redrafted. I also really want to have nice illustrations to go with it but can’t get them to satisfy my inner perfectionist, and so it just sort of hangs there.
After I finish Junction I’ll probably finish up the latest draft and may just post it without the illustrations so that I can be done with it and move on with life.
OUT OF THIS WORLD
A short comic that I started around the time I put Swordmaster Odyssey on hiatus. I never got around to making a page for it here on the Vision Riders site, but you can read it here for now. I’m not sure if I’ll finish it or not (the characters are completely off-model in every single frame and it bothers me to no end). Making the pages also ended up taking way longer than I was planning. It began as a series of thumbnails in my sketchbook charting out the whole story and layout from beginning to end and if I never finish it I’ll probably just scan and upload that version because I think the actual story is really cute.
If I do go back to doing webcomic stuff again, I’ll probably finish this before returning to Swordmaster Odyssey.
AETHERFALL
After giving up on animation I thought I’d try my hand at indie games. A long time ago I made a game called The Pickles which received a great deal of positive acclaim and that I continue to be very proud of. Of all my accomplishments in life, that game is probably the one I am most fond of because it’s something I actually managed to finish and people really enjoyed. With the success of sudden indie game hits like Braid the indie development scene had really taken off, so I thought now was a good time to try my hand at it again.
Aetherfall started out simply enough. It was a fusion of real-time tactics and platforming, taking long-standing traditions from both and mashing them together, at times in the most bizarre of ways. I even got a competitive multiplayer level programmed for it and had fun battling my brother.
Sometimes I feel I gave up on Aetherfall too soon, but it was taking a really long time and some of the programming decisions I’d made early on had begun causing me trouble and so a lot of stuff was going to have to be redone. Thus I put it aside in favor of a shorter project…
JUNCTION
A point-and-click adventure-game that was designed to be small in scope and be completed in about six months. It’s currently in its fourth year of production. Granted, not all that time has been spent directly on Junction. Over that period of time I’ve been uprooted and moved across the country, struggling with everything life decides to throw at me every step of the way. But it’s still taken far longer than it should have, and for the most part I have only myself to blame. Recently things have really picked up, though, so it should be done soon(ish). I hope!
Whew! That took longer to explain than I thought it would! I’m not sure what will become of Vision Riders, but it’s been one heck of a ride. My skills have improved immensely in that span of time, and I really hope that Junction goes over well so that I can keep doing the things I love. What the future holds I can only wait and see.