Homestuck.XYZ 2.0

Thanks to the ongoing support for Hs^2, we currently are getting two updates a month, though only very recently with Some issues here or there, but updates are in fact delivered.

But a thought occured to me recently. Some people have stated the updates have been too short and sometimes it feels like we aren't getting anywhere, a feeling that has lessened a bit thanks to recent shtuffs happening. What if we got double length updates each month rather than two?

would rather get a weekly stream of tiny updates. to keep interest up and about. the monthly update really slows the pace down.

ZingDev wrote: ↑

Sun Apr 05, 2020 1:26 am

would rather get a weekly stream of tiny updates. to keep interest up and about. the monthly update really slows the pace down.

well its bimonthly now. though they had complications last month.

thorondraco wrote: ↑

Sun Apr 05, 2020 2:48 am

well its bimonthly now. though they had complications last month.

Bimonthly is once every 2 months, right?

sigmatic wrote: ↑

Sun Apr 05, 2020 4:13 am

thorondraco wrote: ↑

Sun Apr 05, 2020 2:48 am

well its bimonthly now. though they had complications last month.

Bimonthly is once every 2 months, right?

no it means twice a month. we are still getting the other two updates this month as well as the more recent one was a holdover from last month

still thinking the two updates per month is bullshit. they should try to make more updates, even if they say exactly the days they dropping them, i wouldn't care, i just want it to be more active.

Agreeing with Generalrabogolfo.

Kinda bullshit that Hussie can push out multiple, substantial updates, by himself, for free,
but an entire team that's getting money through Patreon can't. Especially when they're not doing flash animations / walkarounds, and the novel-style narration takes place of actions in comic panels in a lot of instances.
Wtf are they doing.

Having more people on the project should, by all sense of reasonable thought, increase the output.

I disagree that it's bullshit. At a creator myself, Andrew Hussie's work ethic and content output was absolutely bonkers. One of the big reasons it was able to happen so quickly was because Hussie was using sprites and created assets to move around and edit rather than making a brand new drawing each time. And when he DID make a brand new drawing each time, he had an emphasis on making it a Fast And Loose style.

Hussie is also on record as having written by the seat of his pants many times. There was a common sentiment in the old MSPA forums that "90% of calling plot developments is actually influencing it in disguise" due to the nature of the suggestion box. If there was a cool idea that was really clever, Hussie would include it. There's also the element of growth over time, and the outsourcing he did for some art assets from multiple art sources. With no care for consistency, style guides, or particularly high levels of polish, the comic was produced very quickly and made a lot of rapid updates that were not always all that impressive artistically desu. There are multiple moments when the panels of Homestuck have repeated imagery simply because they're assets that already exist and are edited to resemble something else, even if the original context of the asset has nothing to do with the new picture.

Here's an example, featuring the "shocked and partially aroused" face that Hussie himself admits starts to fall apart in other contexts:













Because of these corners that Hussie cut in order to facilitate "fast and loose" and "superquick" updates to chase that dopamine shot that comes from releasing works serially you also got a lot of truly ridiculous off-model moments that look really bad, like the one that inspired Pantskat:



Or this weird Janey Worm



There was also a lot of unnecessary gray shifting going on, because trying to make a lineless style work when the majority of the picture is white or black make the characters seem really washed out or as if they are see-through.











My point is that the artwork in HS2 is certainly of higher quality and better consistency than OG Homestuck, so that part I can understand why they'd request more money for their work and why it still takes a while for the artwork to get done since they aren't hiring new artists with the Patreon money to distribute the workload. They're just paying the artists more money to do more work, but that doesn't change how quickly they work at all.

calamityCons wrote: ↑

Sun Apr 05, 2020 11:41 am

snip

I think no one here is asking for the level of updates hussie pulled when he was doing homestuck. that would be ludricus as fuck to do. what im saying is, why not scatter the updates in a more wide manner? you can still pull out the same numbers of pages for all i care, but that way youd keep the comunity alive through the whole month. thats basically all im asking.

and the art excuse i find it a bit useless when, except for some weird cases, its almost all narrative and text. and they have 8 of those, lest we forget.

I don't have any excuse or explanation for what's going on with the writing team for HS2. I don't know anything at all about the production situation for Homestuck's team. But I do think it's fair to say that when the majority of the updates are narrative/text, and if what you say about having 8 whole writers on the job is true, that actually implies there is even more disagreement or other disruptions happening that 8 people putting their heads together can't seem to agree on things. According to what I know from school and education I have regarding how studio creatives work, 8 people working as a team to write something should be able to produce same amount of content that HS2 is putting out. But again, I have no fucking clue what is even happening behind the veil of the homestuck writing team, I'm in the dark here and only speculating.

As a content creator myself, as well, and as a perfectionist, I was fine with the old HS art.

You don't go to Homestuck looking for stuff to rival the Sistine Chapel.
The quick, sloppy, repetitive art fit the tone of the comic, which is of something that takes the piss on itself constantly. It gave it flavor.

If they're having disagreements in writing, they need to sit down and type out an outline so everyone's on the same page. Like... absolutely any collaborative project should do. Especially if they're being paid for it now.

If you increase the people working on a thing from 1 to... 8 or however many are on the team from what I understand, and you still fail to outpace your previous output, you're doing something seriously wrong.

adding more to that point, Hussie also had a loose set of collaborators when it came for flashes, artist were asked or commissioned to draw and design thing on the fly, the music team was highly improved and bonces back and forth with their ideas and mass produced music in a forum while Hussie hand picked the ones he think will fit, And a single coder put together all the interactive parts. Hussie did not work on homestuck alone, his massive fanbase helped him produce a lot of early homestuck stuff.

Shitpost Lizard wrote: ↑

Sun Apr 05, 2020 2:07 pm

As a content creator myself, as well, and as a perfectionist, I was fine with the old HS art.

You don't go to Homestuck looking for stuff to rival the Sistine Chapel.
The quick, sloppy, repetitive art fit the tone of the comic, which is of something that takes the piss on itself constantly. It gave it flavor.

If they're having disagreements in writing, they need to sit down and type out an outline so everyone's on the same page. Like... absolutely any collaborative project should do. Especially if they're being paid for it now.

If you increase the people working on a thing from 1 to... 8 or however many are on the team from what I understand, and you still fail to outpace your previous output, you're doing something seriously wrong.

I really don't think it would work like that. They have gone with a very, very different structure.

Homestuck before was basically a freeform thought from hussie's eldritch brain. It was able to update constantly cause he was mostly bullshit his way through the story. And seemingly had a lot more freetime.

Homestuck^2 is slower because its a team effort as well as the people working on it not having all that much freetime in comparison. Put simply, they are working it out together as they go along. Though we don't know the entire process, like if they take turns writing. They are keeping mum about it.

There is also the fact that how it updates is completely different, which adds to the thematic nature of it all being in the hands of others both in and out of unvierse. We are not getting a continuous flow of thoughts, we are getting chapters one by one, that completes some kind of goal before ending, minor or major. First one is them reaching the planet and Dirk laying down the law. Second is brainghosts and seemingly moving the candy universe in a different direction than the epilogues showed.

I do admit that them bouncing around makes things feel more slow though. Even if the last few bounces had stuff REALLY happening. But ultimately its a different pace than og homestuck and its deliberate. Both in how they are pacing the story and working on it NOT being hussie himself with his eldritch brain.

Its why i made this post and wondered if someone would prefer a singular larger update over two updates a month. But it seems like a lot of people prefered how it was in the old days. Though its like they said. Its not homestuck but its not not homestuck.

It is a difficult line to tread when you have to decide between improving upon what was already set before or branching off in a completely new direction.

I personally like the twice a month, large updates. If they crammed two updates into one day it would be a bit much to absorb in one sitting, especially given how text-heavy homestuck is. Plus, this let's them space it out so you dont get too bored. I think asking for daily updates, even small ones, is bit unreasonable. Looking at other web media, from comics to web novels, even the most prolific tend to update, at most, 3 times a week. Even this is unreasonable when you look at the size of an update for homestuck 2. Homestuck 2 averages around 30 pages per update, which is about 60 a month (excluding outliers like the one long Rose page). That's a lot of content! It's a bit pushy to ask for 2 pages a day, which include both art and usually a pretty substantial amount of prose, when pretty much no one in the industry does that. This is all on top of patreon rewards, which include both an additional multi-page update and commentary on each update!

VASKA wrote: ↑

Sun Apr 05, 2020 6:44 pm

I personally like the twice a month, large updates. If they crammed two updates into one day it would be a bit much to absorb in one sitting, especially given how text-heavy homestuck is. Plus, this let's them space it out so you dont get too bored. I think asking for daily updates, even small ones, is bit unreasonable. Looking at other web media, from comics to web novels, even the most prolific tend to update, at most, 3 times a week. Even this is unreasonable when you look at the size of an update for homestuck 2. Homestuck 2 averages around 30 pages per update, which is about 60 a month (excluding outliers like the one long Rose page). That's a lot of content! It's a bit pushy to ask for 2 pages a day, which include both art and usually a pretty substantial amount of prose, when pretty much no one in the industry does that. This is all on top of patreon rewards, which include both an additional multi-page update and commentary on each update!

Chapter 5 was weird. Like it kinda made sense cause it wsa focusing on rose wandering off from the 'center of the story' as it were. But it was kinda obviously because they didn't have time for a bunch of art but planned ahead of time. Clever tricky bastards.

But yea the vsat majority of webcomic update only a few times a week at most, some monthly. And it almost killed hussie making homestuck at the pace he was doing, even if the art was more simplistic.

What I don't understand is that if the team is incapable of producing updates at a satisfying rate, why they don't do anything to amend that. There have been several instances of typos, or issues in grammar present throughout all of HS^2, updates coming out after when they were supposed to. Naturally both of these are indicators of the rushed schedule of Homestuck^2, and I'm sure the team is working as fast as they can on every update, but I still don't see how with upwards of 8 writers, they can't even proofread their own work. Seriously, even if you proofread like 2 pages a day you'd still be able to get updates out at a solid rate, and the process of proofreading a typical page from Homestuck takes at most 30 minutes. I'm no artist, but I do draw on occasion, and I know fully well how long that process can take, but if the blame for the speed of the updates does fall on the artists, then there should be no excuse for the flaws in the writing. There's a lot of unnecessary fat surrounding Homestuck^2 and other WP related projects, having any team will inevitably make the process of finalizing anything much more arduous, but when writing, if you have to run an idea by 7 people, if not more, and try to get them to all agree, you should consider trimming some of that fat to streamline the process.

Double updates. The fandom gets two opportunities to talk about plot per month instead of one.

Honestly, if we could get bite-sized weekly updates, that would be great. Just split the month's material into pieces. It would require the writers to outline more ahead of schedule, though, like they were making a normal webcomic, and I'm not sure how they'd get there without a giant hiatus to build up buffer material.

For now, I'm fine with bimonthly updates. The material feels more manageable to read when it's split in half.

This is why I can't really say anything for what is going on behind the scenes of Homestuck right now. In my own experience in studio workspaces for creative projects, a team of 6 students can finalize 6 character designs within two weeks, and even keep them all in the same style following the same stylesheet and making them all look cohesive. In fact, many times my professors have told me that a professional studio workspace can sometimes request thumbnails, sketches, and one-paragraph plot outlines to be done within a DAY to focus on getting the content out and refining it, tuning it, adding, subtracting, and finally polishing it to satisfaction before being released. Based on my experience in professional environments and learning how to work in studio spaces as well as how to handle entrepreneurial art things, What Pumpkin Studios seem to be struggling quite a lot and I'm starting to get genuinely concerned that they're biting off more than they can chew.

Also, there is no confirmation afaik of there actually being 8 writers. In studio workplaces that involve writing, you usually work as a whole team to create the "episodes" or chapters in this case to make sure it all goes well and works together. You also need to spend a decent amount of time making character sheets and a Universe Bible to make sure certain details are never misplaced or forgotten. This is all preproduction stuff, notes and bulletins and a conspiracy theorist's corkboard and yarn that you can reference whenever you need to so that the details line up. So far there have been multiple inconsistencies in the writing that go beyond simple typos, such as: why doesn't John have a mustache? Where did Vriska's eyepatch come from? How old is Possessed Jade? Something seems rotten in the state of new york, but I have no real way of determining what that is, nor is it my place to tell these people what to do.

It's just... from the perspective of someone who is in school specifically to become an independent creator of content such as webcomics and video games, like What Pumpkin, I'm finding a lot of the tenets and best practices I'm learning about in school are not being reflected in the output from What Pumpkin. I won't pretend I'm an expert or anything, I'm mostly just confused and worried.

very small updates but happening in a 2-3 day basis would be my absolute prefered method.
daily updates was what made Homestuck on its first acts very interesting to many people and I know it obviously cant be done again but I'd much rather have 2-3 days of wait for like 1-2 pages than 30 days for ~20 pages. It keeps the story fresh on our heads. It's also the reason why reader commands were so fun back then.
Of course, Hussie was almost a NEET so he had the time to do that back in the day but now everyone has 6-7 part time jobs and twitter rambling to do so I guess thats impossible(ignore the quarantine).

but I absolutely prefer double updates than waiting an entire month for the equivalent of one shonen manga chapter, I read JoJo which has MORE pages but even then, stories with that kind of schedule takes DECADES to finish and I'd MUCH rather not considering how GLACIAL the pacing is right now and how boring things are.
they have 5-6 writers on this for god's sake I know art is the biggest time sink but holy fuck why cant they just find someone new to help on the art instead of leaving it to 1-2 people to actually draw while everyone else fights over themselves to decide what gets in the story?