Commentary: Introduction

I used to really struggle with a lack of artistic fulfilment. 

I had plenty of ideas in my head. I’d talk about em often with my brother and best friend Rhys, ideating and conceptualising, building out overviews for stories and games and all sorts of cool stuff. But I could never get myself to the point of actually executing on any of them. The process of actually making one of these stories was too monumental, and every time I’d try with something I’d get stuck on some little problem I couldn’t get past or I’d just be demoralised by the enormity of the task I’d set out for myself. I’d make a gameplay prototype, or I’d get a few pages in, but eventually my motivation would run dry and I would be totally unable to so much as look at that project again. And I despaired over this, for a while, and I worried if I would ever make anything, if I would take all these ideas in my head into the grave with me after a life unfulfilled.

Foreach was, for a while, just one of many of those ideas. It wasn’t even a particularly old one, I only thought it up like 3 years before starting the comic proper, mid-2019. It began with a conversation I had with Rhys about Stephen King of all things. You know how King is always writing stories about writers from Maine? Rhys observed how you don’t seem to see the same phenomenon happening in videogames; there’s not a whole lot of videogames where the main character is a game developer. He proposed some kind of horror game where you play as the dev and also play the game the dev was developing. Because I’m a little shit that loves metafiction, I immediately suggested that the game-within-a-game is also about a game developer, and there’s like a chain of videogames that eventually, like, loops in on itself.

And this was an idea that I took away, and then iterated on, and then brought back to Rhys, and then we’d talk about it together and build it out into something it resembled today. Not all at once, it was more like every few months one of us would be like “remember Foreach?” and we’d spend a few weeks after that fervently talking about it and planning out story beats, and then after that we’d remember some other cool idea we had and we’d talk about that a whole bunch. Foreach wasn’t, like, particularly special out of any of those zillion ideas we had, but it did end up being the one I got most hardcore Into planning. Something about the complexity of it drove me to go a lot further to actually figure out what happens in the story, how all the myriad plotlines might fit together, and so the documents I made for it ended up being much more detailed than the material I’d made for any other of the creative works I had in my head.

And yet… I still couldn’t shake that sense of artistic frustration. I was always talking about things like this, and they’d seem so cool in my head, but I never followed through! I never got to know what it would look like if it were real! I eventually accepted a four-games-in-one ubergame was way beyond any scope I could hope to achieve. So I scoped it down, from game, to a petscop-style video series, and then to a traditional comic, and then even further into the pictures-with-dialogue-boxes format close to what it is today, but even after that it all felt insurmountable, so many assets I would need to make to sell the idea even in its smallest form. I wouldn’t say I gave up on it, exactly, but that sensation that I was never going to do anything with myself started to follow me around, not just because of Foreach but because of every other idea and story and game I’d left by the wayside, and the frustration started churning in my gut and spreading out to pushing at my skin from the inside. Never with enough force to break through. Only ever enough to hurt.

What changed? What changed… What changed was I was doing some work for my dad, and he was teaching me some web development, and he showed me the border-radius attribute in CSS that allows you to give an element rounded corners, and I thought to myself, hey, I bet you could use this to make some cool Earthbound-style textboxes. And that seemed like a good fit for Foreach, right? So one afternoon after work I signed up to Neocities so I could have a canvas, and I made a test page out of a draft script I had, and I scrapped some art together in CSP to use for illustrations, and that was that. I had a page.

And what shocked me then was that it was so, so, easy.

Every other time I’d tried to make one of my big ideas it had been a lot of work and knuckling down and really expending effort to even get started, but this? I just, like, did it. On a lark! Almost as an afterthought! It was a few hours of dicking around on a Thursday afternoon. All I would need to do to make this thing real was to spend a few hours dicking around once a week for however long it took and then it would, like, exist. It really was that simple. I launched the comic properly like 2 weeks later, six months later I was done with chapter one, and now here we are. 

That’s my first lesson: make it easy for yourself. If something feels too hard, maybe that’s because it really is, but don’t despair! Because there are always other options. There are cheats, there are shortcuts, there are rules you never even realised you were following. A game doesn’t have to be a game, a comic doesn’t have to be a comic. In the wise words of, um, someone on tumblr: “You can do whatever you want forever.”

If you want my second and third and fourth lessons, good news! That’s what the rest of this commentary series is gonna be about. I’m gonna go page by page and talk about my thought processes and learning experiences along the way – with spoilers, by the way, so make sure you’re up to date! I hope you can learn a thing or two from my mistakes and my successes… and even if you don’t, I hope you have fun reading all this anyway~.

Rhys' Thoughts:

Hey! It's me, Brother Rhys! Nice to meecha. I've got a lot of thoughts about big ideas, chronic daydreaming and getting stuck before you've even started. On one hand, I think it's okay to have ideas that are too big to execute. I think it's probably healthy to not focus your imagination solely on what you can produce for other people and old ideas can be drawn from as material for new ideas. Me and Lumsel attribute a lot of the skills we have in communication and storytelling to sharing these ideas with each other, our sisters and occasionally our friends while we were growing up. Telling stories to people you know is a form of storytelling too! The oldest form in fact! 

Where this starts to be a problem is if you find the stories can't seem to break free of your imagination. In your imagination, stories can exist in a state of flux where parts of them never properly solidify, which can be really frustrating. if you've ever had an idea where you think you know exactly how a scene plays out but then you try to think about what characters actually say, how they got there or what happens next then you know what I'm talking about. This is the point where fantasising about the finished product stops being satisfying and becomes irritating. And that's the point that Lumsel was at by the start of that fourth paragraph up there.

I think this is where that fantasising turns into perfectionism. Lum had tried to motivate themself to make several other stories around this time but they could never power through the dissatisfaction of having to build up to the parts of the story that actually interest them. My advice at the time was that instead of having the parts you like in a story bridged with functional storytelling that you don't care about, you have to make even the purely functional scenes fun and interesting to yourself. Or just fold the stuff you have to get through into the scenes you actually want to write. Lum agreed with me that this made sense but it didn't really make sense to them until they got a surge of inspiration with… 

Foreach!?

I must admit, I was a little bit worried when Lum started to talk about scoping down with Foreach. I was always happy to daydream about when we would have the skills to make a fake video game with 4 different art styles (holy shit), so when the possibility of having to cut out some of the stuff i really liked to make it possible arose, I was initially on the side of just letting it exist as a fantasy hypothetical story building project. But as Lum kept building momentum and showing me the tests, I had to come to terms with the idea that this was the only way Foreach was actually going to happen. 

You see, just like you dear viewer, I have a lot of big story ideas that have felt too big for me to actually create. At the time I had recently broken through my perfectionist mindset and made a few smaller story projects that I was quite happy with, but the stories I really wanted to make, with proper characters to follow and a world you can feel them inhabit, still felt beyond me. I thought of my completed projects as the first steps to gaining the skills needed to make them but I think I still had a lot of that perfectionist fear of sullying an idea by making an imperfect attempt at creating. 

Foreach challenged that by being our most gonzo, out there complex, planned out idea that was already turning out different to what I expected right out of the gate. My brain wanted to make sure every page was perfect before it went live, lest any opportunities to set up future pages or build ideal pace be squandered, but that would be hypocritical to how I think the creative process should work. Not only is it kind of grandiose to assume that my brain produces the correct version of a scene, but it is also important for any creator to actually make mistakes. All of the stories you like have dropped the ball at some point, even if only their creators know when, and every good scene has a thousand possible alternate good scenes that would have had different trade offs (that may have even have made the overall story worse!). Some of the most famous arcs in history have even been written to work with an authors' previous mistakes! 

All this to say that we here on the creative team know what that longing to create feels like. Each of us are at different points of breaking through that resistance to putting pen to paper; and it never fully goes away, even for Lum. But when ever i feel stuck, I try to remember that the next step to making a story is always to write something, even if it is only the imperfect form of the story you want to make. If it you hate it and it sucks you can always just make it again later.