Category Archives: Meta

This doesn't have anything to do with HeroMachine, comics, or super-heroes, but it is random, which has practically become the theme of this blog anyway. GMail has this feature where they put up brief headlines over your email inbox, and this appeared just a few minutes ago:

I couldn't figure out why they would single out this gentleman in particular as a cracker, since I don't usually think of either GMail or the English as racial profilers. But then I actually clicked on the link and discovered they were talking about a hacker who cracks code. Whew!

I don't think anyone noticed, but I didn't publish a "Monday Mashup" last week or today in favor of exploring the "Comic Book Improv" concept instead. So I'd like to take this chance to get your thoughts on the whole Mashup experiment. Was it good, bad, or indifferent? Would you like to see it return, or stay blissfully dead? If you want it to come back, what did you like or dislike about it?

I'm heading out of town to Louisiana for a wedding (not mine!) today, returning Sunday. I've got a number of posts scheduled to go up so by all means check in as usual, but if I'm slow responding to comments, that's why.

As I've continued to ponder the "Community-driven comic book", I've been forced to confront once again the creative person's greatest foe -- the fear of sucking. People talk about various artists being "courageous" and I always that that was a load of steaming horse puckey. And believe me, living in Texas with four horses and seven donkeys, I know me some horse puckey.

But there's certainly a nugget of truth there. When you're trying something you haven't done before, I think the fear of failure, of being really bad at it, is the biggest obstacle to actually getting it done. People might laugh, you might be exposed as a fraud, you might find out (as so many aspiring singers do on "American Idol") that you aren't any good at something you thought was your strong suit.

What most people forget, though, is that all of the greats in history have been failures at many points in their lives. Edison had many, many more failed inventions than he did light bulbs. To succeed, you have to give yourself permission to suck. You aren't going to be the best right out of the gate, but hopefully you'll improve over time, eventually getting to the point where you don't suck any more.

You're definitely going to suck for a while, though, and that's pretty intimidating.

So that's sort of where I am on this whole thing. I've done illustrations for gaming products before, I've gotten paid for drawing, and I've put together a successful Internet product, and I sucked at all of them in the beginning. I've sucked at every job I've ever had, at least at the beginning. Eventually I got better, but I really hate sucking. Hate it. It brings up all of the feelings of being a failure from childhood, of being judged as lacking by friends and family, of making me question my value as a human being.

And the fact is, I don't know how to put together a good comic. I don't know how to ink a whole page of different panels so they work well together, or maybe even how to craft a successful single panel. I don't know how to pace a plot in sequential art, and I don't know how to remain consistent throughout a story. All of that would be completely new to me, and I'm almost definitely going to suck at all of it. At once. On the same page, there will be multiple avenues of suckage.

So the first thing to do, before I even start down the road, is to decide to give myself permission to suck. Because success isn't an option unless the failure is, too. I'll let you know if and when I get there.

Sometimes you spend an inordinate amount of time on a project, and in the course of it come across a problem you just can't solve. You struggle and struggle with it, and ultimately -- after lots of fruitless effort -- end up going with some half-assed workaround that's incredibly inelegant and stupid, but which gets the job done. You hate doing it, but you just can't figure out any other way, and there's a deadline so you just say "To hell with it" and move on.

And then in a blinding flash of light some time later, the right solution comes to you and you realize you were going about the entire thing exactly backwards.

Naturally the insight comes much too late to do you any actual good, thus making you feel twice the fool for not having thought of it before.

This is the situation I am in currently with the whole "FaceMaker/HeroMachine 3" preview items. In HeroMachine 2.x, keeping the preview items updated was a big pain. I had to manually cut and paste the lineart in to the preview boxes, and manually rename the button to match the item. If I misspelled anything, it wouldn't work. If I later wanted to change a name, I had to manually retype it in, again avoiding any silly mistakes. Adding new items was a pain.

So when I started working on this new code base upon which first the "HeroMachine Mini" apps would be built, and hopefully later HeroMachine 3, I wanted to figure out a way to have the preview items auto-populate. Only I couldn't figure out how. I really didn't want to go back to manually adding them all, but I couldn't see any other way around it.

Until today, just now, when I finally finished adding all the art and all the programming and it's too late to go back and change it all. So I'm going to have to manually add all the preview items in FaceMaker, knowing now that had I had this insight at the beginning instead of the end, I could have easily made it all work.

Very frustrating, even though at least now I see a way forward for the next version.

Of course I'm basically going to have to rewrite the program from scratch to make it all happen in the next version, which is also not appealing.

Feh. Sometimes a good insight too late is worse than never having had it at all.

I had a major setback last week with the "Facemaker" project. I had the basic code all written and more than half of the artwork in when I decided to try the much-coveted "Save as JPG" feature. In order to get that to work, I had to upgrade from ActionScript 2 to ActionScript 3. Which then broke literally everything else. I had to start completely over, and re-write the program basically from the ground up while simultaneously trying to teach myself the new version of ActionScript.

The good news is, that all only took a week and I was able to save all of the artwork. As of today I have 95% of the functionality back and working in ActionScript 3, including "Save as JPG". The last missing piece is only halfway done, and that's the AS3-based custom color component. I have a working grid in place so you can select a color, but still need to get that color applied to the desired object. It took me all day today so far just to figure out how to move the color gradient where I wanted it to be. Good times.

In any event, it's mostly back to a working state and tomorrow I plan on picking up where I left off with adding the rest of the content and items. I've just gotten word that there are going to be two major new custom versions to do, one to make custom skateboard designs and the other that's specific to the items in an upcoming game. Those are both projects for UGO advertising clients, and take precedence over any other development, so I'm going to try and cram in as much work on the Facemaker stuff as I can before those hit. At that point I'll release what I've got for early beta testing if it's in a working state.

Behind the scenes here at HeroMachine Central, I am writing this post on my "new to me" Macintosh Pro, just received a couple of hours ago. So far it's going well -- nothing has exploded and, even better, I have not yet turned into the dorky "Mac Guy" from the commercials.

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Frequent commenter Niall Mor has a good post up at his blog comparing three of the more popular character portrait creators that's well worth checking out. He has links to all three and sample images as well, so head on over and take a look when you get the chance.