Im Fiction

HDPS Chapter 1

Added 2023-01-23 12:22:49 +0000 UTC

Hello!

How's the year started for you?

Hopefully better than mine!

After the mandatory holidays, I got around to continuing the comic draft I initially shared back in September, the Project HDPS, which is short of the working title, "High Difficulty, Pure Skill".

Yeah, I spent the whole of 5 seconds thinking up that. Maybe we'll come up with a better title down the line. I'm open for suggestions!

This comic, or manga, or graphic novel—however you want to call it—tells the story of Trude, a girl who has the makings of a hero, but whose life ends up going off the rails for awfully mundane reasons.

From memories of her past lives, she gains knowledge to fight the unfairness of life in a semi-medieval fantasy land, but that knowledge is often more a curse than a blessing. Where will that path take her?

Anyway, I did some proper lineart and tones, along with a new title page, which I'm now glad to share with you.

Hope you like it.

I don't know how well Patreon's gallery system works for sharing comics, but we can only find out by giving it a try.

You can now compare it with the early draft, and see how linework changes the look and feel of the pages. I intended to go for a quick and rough style with this work, but before I knew it I was getting lost in the little details again. I'm just broken like that, I guess!

I'd like to say I have a clear image in my mind how the pages are supposed to look, but in all honesty, the final result is often a surprise for myself too (lol). Sometimes a pleasant surprise, sometimes less so...

Alas, I couldn't quite complete all the pages of the draft in the two weeks I had for it. I got the lineart for every page, but adding tones is a super slow, tedious job.

But I'll share here what I have ready now and update this post in the coming weeks as I get more pages finished. There are 20 in total for chapter 1. So check back again later!

I planned this comic project as something of a mini-series, about 8-10 chapters or so. The other chapters are meant to be shorter, around 10 pages. But let's see how far we get.

For now, let's just focus on finishing the first chapter.

Thank you for reading!

As always, your patronage is much appreciated.

Until next time!

UPDATE 1/30: Added pages 6-10.

Also rewrote some lines and changed the font. In some comic script fonts, "I" looks like the roman numeral 1, and I personally dislike that. It may seem like a really petty thing, but if it makes readability even 0.03% better, then it's a change worth making, in my opinion!

UPDATE 2/3: Added pages 11-15.

UPDATE 2/7: Added pages 16-20. The chapter is now finished! Hope you like it!