The first year of the new Pocket Bear Press website has come to a close. I've accomplished a lot this year, although this dang chapter was supposed to be done months ago. First, I finally have a website. As I've mentioned before, this is my first real website. Not a wordpress blog or a Webcomics Nation (Miss you, Joey) account. I have a comic and an outline of where it's going and other stories I can spin out of it, in different times and genres. I started work on turning Gemfarers into a videogame, although I still have plans for table top Gemfarers games.

In the coming year, I hope to expand the Gemfarers part of the site with a paper doll maker and possibly the rules for the tabletop version of the game. I plan on expanding the doll maker into a proper dress-up game for download, as the first part of making a Gemfarers game. I hope to have a working version of the dungeon crawling part of the game as a stand-alone by the end of the year. Mostly as a tech demo so I can figure out how the dress-up game will play with animating characters. Is what I'm planning a complete resource hog? I hope not!

Here's to a betterish year.

I've been learning Godot in between drawing comic pages, hoping to translate Gemfarers into a videogame. One of the first issues that cropped up is that Gemfarers has always been about customization, due to starting as a miniatures game. Fortunately, I learned that 2D sprites have advanced quite a bit since I last looked into it. I spent an evening making a cut-out doll to practice with, and it turns out there are a lot more shared parts than I thought. So it looks like I can keep the same variety in a videogame.

The simplicity of the costumes also means they work at any size, so I can scale them for both on-field graphics and profile art (possibly with more detailed faces, if I can figure that out).  Elf hands and digitigrade feet won't require entirely new art. The ogres and some other creatures would require their own set of parts.

By using 2D skeletons, I can animate the dolls in the game engine, instead of having to draw frames. I will have to make front and back versions, though.

My current plans are to start with creating a dollmaker for the site, essentially a character creator game. Following that, I'd like to upgrade it to a dress-up game, where you play as a tailor making outfits for gemfarers that match their gemaster's aesthetic. This will give me an opportunity to work the kinks out of the dolls and animations before working on a larger game.

I am planning on doing a simple dungeon crawler next, with exploration in the style of Steven Universe Attack the Light. It would involve a team of four gemfarers, so I might incorporate the four face buttons on a controller with the character's positions in a diamond.

Once I have the character creator and dungeon crawler, I will use them as the basis for the actual Gemfarers strategy game. The dungeon crawling would be side quests a single unit of four gemfarers from your larger team can go on to strengthen their bonds.

I am looking forward to adding videogames to the Gemfarers canon, but I am still planning on releasing the tabletop version, probably without miniatures at first. Hopefully Gemfarers and Bear Corner can grow into an unwieldy ecosystem of nonsense. And I promise to keep all of it in online right here for as long as possible. 

Today you're getting just the sketch layer. I decided Argonauts was a good name for the big adventure organization. So I sketched out the whole crew. They fit the GI Joe niche in the fake Marvel 80s. On the bottom right you can see the classic team that I mentioned in the last post. Hovering above them on the right hover platform (not sure if these are canon but they look cool) is the original squad that formed the organization. They are based off the Fantastic Four and act as a public face for the Argonauts Corporation.

Next to them is definitely not Superman, who actually was a dropped character from the superhero team of my youth. He's not an actual member of this group, but they have a history so I included him for a little flair.

On the left are the children of the first group. They ae small and sketchy but they are based on Crystal, Medusa, the Ms Marvel no one cares about, and Namor. Hovering slightly in front and to the side of them is a Kristoff Von Doom fella who might be a Doctor Who homage. I haven't decided on that yet.

In front of the hover platform is a squad with two of Brock's old street fighting aquaintances, a ninja, and a guy who I drew in at the last minute. I think he has big guns. This squad was inspired by the Street Fighter figures from the GI Joe line. I always liked the concept of Guile and Chun-li being connected to the Joes, so I stuck them in here. They got the mandatory ninja because he fits in the best with them.

Finally, on the far left we have the heavy armor squad. They were slapped together at the last minute so they barely have concepts. But I threw in a General Hawk backpack at least.

This is probably the most ridiculous team I've spent time creating because they likely will not appear in anything at all. I just wanted to have a concept of how many squads there might be.

When I was brainstorming my little knock-off Marvel universe, I wanted to include the licensed 80s comics as well. That meant GI Joe. Which was basically SHIELD. And that didn't quite work in my world, but they would work as part of The Organization™. Which was a great fit for my original superhero team I made when I was twelve. They traveled between the real world and a fantasy world just like this new organization. So I welcomed back the Argonauts. 

The Argonauts started as you would expect, with my self-insert OC. Originally named Firestorm, he traveled between videogame worlds with an arsenal of videogame tools. Because I was twelve and it was the early nineties. I quickly replaced the tools with pyrokinesis, and renamed him Flare. His new origin still started off with force field powers as a nod to his earlier incarnation. The idea was that he lost the force field macguffin before developing pyrokinesis.

The Argonauts started as a group of five real-world adventurers traveling a fantasy world. They were led by Atalanta, and included Flare, as well as Sonic (known as Falconer at the time), Frost, and Roc. Poor Roc did not make the cut for this modern incarnation, but he's around somewhere. Frost was not originally a fat bear. This design was from a modern-day superhero who I retroactively decided was the same guy as the one on the Argonauts.

I quickly came up with the idea that Flare was lost in the multiverse (losing his force field macguffin in the process). I drew some terrible covers of the six-issue limited series detailing this journey, ending with Flare being stranded in the Marvel Universe. The Argonauts show up at the end to fight him (or so the cover claims. And covers never lie).

At this point, four more members had been added. Goliath, Fairy (Thumbelina), Morningstar (yes that was always their name), and Tome. These four represented characters native to the fantasy world, and still do. Morningstar was originally a basic elf, but I redesigned them to fit the Gemfarers version of the fantasy world, and to look more edgy.

Flare really was stuck in the Marvel Universe, which meant he needed his own superteam. Psi Force was led by Flare, and included a number of characters who would stick around in various forms for decades. These characters ended up in an epic crossover with the Argonauts, chronicled in a series of illustrations where they were captured by monsters and scattered across the fantasy world.

There were other characters, like Tempest, who I mentioned in another blog post, and a half-werewolf prince. And of course, Flare would go on to hang around the Marvel Universe, butting into various events.

Eventually, I rebooted the characters back into their own continuity, paring them down into a group of six: Flare, Amalgam and Glitch from Psi Force, Atalanta (Now called Artemis and using a moon them), Roc, and a new character named Alchemy.. This group ended up being the base for many attempts at comics over my adult career.

Now the original gang is back in Around Bear Corner, although it's just Flare, Sonic, and Frost, now a retired throuple, living on the same floor as the main characters. I do plan on having a chapter that focuses on them, with the rest of the gang being mentioned.

Around Bear Corner takes place in a larger universe, and sometimes I go overboard. One of the bits of backstory is that the 80s and 90s looked a lot like Marvel comics.Because I love Marvel comics. Unfortunately, the superhero team that's actually relevant wasn't quite super enough, so I ended up sketching out a proper Avengers stand-in. I have no idea what their name would be, but they formed in 1981 and probably disbanded by the mid 90s.Front and center, we have

Shooting Star: A Captain America stand-in. Since Steve from Here and Queer is also a Captain America expy, I need something to differentiate this guy. Right now he has a gun. Maybe he's a bit jingoistic, who knows?

Steel Rocket: The armored tank and smart guy. I based him off the Mark-I armor to give him more personality.

Stormhammer: Not Thor. A godling who pops up throughout the decades of superheroes. He was probably born around 1900, so he's rather young. The hammer bit might change, but I really like hammers.

And from the left:

Orchid: The hot chick who has no real powers.

Doctor Titan: I really like Giant Man and the Wasp, but I already had a big guy / tiny woman duo elsewhere in the 80s. Then I remembered there's nothing more Marvel than multiple Giant Mans running around.

Pixie: Basically just the Wasp.

Dark Angel: This reskinned Spider-woman is an old character. I originally created her as a reskinned Spider-woman 20 years ago for a New-Mutants-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off fic I was tossing around. So when I needed a Spider-woman, I called her up.

Bombshell: Is this character green? Does she have a radiation-related origin? I have no idea. I just really like She-Hulk.

To the right:

Victorious: The first character who is actually still around in Around Bear Corner (she shows up in chapter 5 or 6) I gave her a goofy face mask for this incarnation.

Stranger: A gemental pretending to be an android. This guy is problematic. Are they the first gemoid? They are throwing my world-building into disarray. Eh, I'll figure it out later.

Weaponsmith: The father of Clint from Around Bear Corner. I couldn't come up with a costume so he kinda just got a sucky Hawkeye ripoff. He was on a team with Steve back in the 60s, so I guess he's in his forties here? He's also the token black guy. Yes, I made sure there was only one. Because these are Avengers.

Tempest: So my first superhero team that I made when I was 12 are in this setting, but some of the ancillary characters got dropped. Tempest existed in a single drawing, and was reworked into Alchemy, who has a direct lineage to the Abigail Queen character I used in a bunch of comics back in the day. So when shuffling characters around, I made Tempest Abigail's mother, and the sister of Gemagick (Weaponsmith's wife). And when I needed a Scarlet WItch that was sassier than Gemagick, Tempest was there. What's great is she also embodies the main trait of the Scarlet Witch, which is being crazy.

So that's Earth-ABC's Mightiest Heroes. What will they get up to? I'll figure that out if I ever actually write a story set back then.

I have tentative campaign rules for Gemfarers, which required coming up with recruitment rules. How best to give players a meaningful choice without stifling them? I settled on grouping everyone into three groups (because the game uses six-sided die): Humans, Fae, and Other. This provided for random chance but still allowing the player some control over how their army looked. Here's all the freaks of Gemfarers (which coincidentally exist in Around Bear Corner, since they share a universe).

Humans (and derivatives)

Humans (Earth): The people of Earth. They recently learned about gemfaring after the Fae Realm was rediscovered in the 90s. According to faeries, the magic of Earth humans tastes different. Faeries can tell which humans were born on Earth by their scent.

Humans (Fae-born): Humans who were born in the Fae Realm. These humans are descended from humans who either wandered into the Fae Realm or were kidnapped. There is no real difference between them and their Eath-born counterparts, except how their magic "tastes" to faeries.

Human Furries: Unlike Faerie furries, who get their forms from a god, human furries rely on gem technology. Faeries do not consider them to be real furries, and treat them as they would any other humans.

Mutants: The ESPers of Gemfarers. They have inborn magic abilities similar to those granted by gems. For millennia, they were rare, but the event that caused the rediscovery of the Fae Realm in the 90s also increased the birthrate of new mutants.

Numen: A small, isolated ethnic group where everyone is a mutant. Inspired by Marvel's Inhumans, because as annoying as they were I always liked the idea of a society of super-jerks. All numen wear masks, another reference to the Inhumans.

Godlings: Long-lived, divinely-touched humans created to serve the gods. They live in the Fae Realm in a Warcraft-inspired region. A few of them are active on Earth as superheroes because why not?

Orcs: I took a long time figuring out how to add orcs to gemfarers. Eventually I made them a cursed group of humans. They live in the Warcraft-inspired region and are few in number. Their culture is very Scottish.

Lichlings: The counterpart to Warcraft's forsaken. They are created by daemons from human corpses, but are very much alive and not rotting. Their faces resemble skulls, with sunken, empty eye sockets. A small, glowing gem sits in one of the eye sockets.

Faeries

Faeries: Horns, pointy ears, and tails. Faeries feed off magic (and food). They were the first gemfarers. Faeries do not have names for genders and instead use "orii" (smaller) and "ogre" (larger). These words can also apply to the two types of faeries. The normal-sized are orii, while the rare few who choose to magically increase their size are ogres. Ogres are powerful gemfarers who absorb enough magic and grow to nine feet tall. Ogres are usually fat, but rather than the fat organ, most of their mass comes from a magic-absorbing organ that conveniently behaves exactly as fat would on a similarly-proportioned humanoid that wasn't scaled up. For narrative convenience.

Furries: Furries come in a variety of forms, which conveniently translate to the English anthro, feral, taur, naga, kemonomimi. One of the rules of Gemfarers is that names should be simple whenever possible, so why not use the real-life furry terms? Most furries follow the goddess Ligra, a tiger-headed serpentine dragon. Furries can be ogres, and a rare few are pixies, a very orii form that is only a few inches tall. Pixies are mostly small religious sects, as it is very hard to live at that size.

Elves: An off-shoot of faeries covered in velvet fur and with three fingers and shorter, monkey like tails. Elves adapt to their environment. You can usually tell where an elf is from by their fur or unique features.

Duegers: Basically dwarves, with mouse-like features. Like all faeries, they can be ogres, sometimes simply increasing their height to a respectable 6 feet, sometimes more. Very rarely, a dueger will grow themselves to eighteen feet, becoming sedentary mountain kings.

Gnomes: Orii monkey people. They can often be found living with dwarves, but also far from civilization or in Lichling lands.

Others

So. Gemfarers.

I first started coming up with the idea of Gemfarers in 2015. I have been playing table-top miniature games since 2004, and longed for a proper Warcraft miniature war game. That never happened, so I made my own game. I wanted to blend the Warcraft aesthetic with magical girls and dapper outfits.

Originally, Gemfarers was set in space, hence the name. Adventurers would travel the stars using gems. I eventually decided to set it on a single fantasy world, and made it a parallel to Earth so I could create a queer-friendly fantasy world without losing queer history. Also superheroes.

The main theme of Gemfarers is having one large general commanding squads of petite troops. This is inspired somewhat by Warcraft, where commanders are typically scaled up to ridiculous heights. It's also inspired by my just liking size differences. The squad size was set at four, to mimic the five-man band trope. For example, in Sailor Moon or Samurai Troopers, there was a main team of five, with a further team of four that the leader would also fill the fifth slot for.

The general (called a gemaster) has a special assistant unit. This was originally lifted from another war game, Wargods of Aegyptus, where the priest unit existed solely to give buffs (and command archers, if you're short on commanders). I changed assistants over time to be more of a romantic partner, like Tuxedo Mask from Sailor Moon, or Pearl from Steven Universe.

I wrote up a draft of the rules over the course of a year, going through numerous iterations of how special attacks worked. They were always based on DiC Sailor Moon rules, where attacks usually had three words in their name, starting with the planet. Eventually I settled on a system where the first two words have no game effect. The finalized special powers use the naming scheme [Gem] [Talisman] [Power], where power is one of the special skills available in the rules. For example, one gemfarer's special attack might be "Jade Sword Slash".

There were a lot more pit stops along the way, but that's the gist of how I got from writing up Warcraft army lists to having the skeleton of a magical girl war game.

So I finally have a real website to house all my projects. Mainly my comic, Around Bear Corner, which will update very sporadically, I'm sure. Eventually I hope to get the Gemfarers section set up as well.

Looking back at websites past, my first was on Webcomics Nation (Miss you, Joey). I had a comic strip that ran for two whole weeks. I've had a Tumblr for ages, where I've posted random art and comics over the decades. At one point I tried hosting a comic on Wordpress, though I think I gave up and just dumped it on Tumblr.

This site is run on ComicControl, which is way more streamlined than Wordpress. The about page is literally just the built-in gallery template.

Here's to webcomics! May they never update on a schedule.