Monoclelad Blog

So I recently got Minecraft. Which given my personality of getting easily addicted to videogames was a very bad idea. I didn’t need a highly addictive game to become addicted. You should stay away from the game. But if you already play you should let me know, I’ll send you an invite to join my server.

So in an attempt to carve out my own little spot of the my servers virtual landscape I first thought to use the colorful blocks of minecraft to make giant islands of sprites, you know sort of a virtual Dubai. But I am a comic artist at heart, and when I told friends I was planning on making a comic inside minecraft and they groaned, I knew I had a winning idea.

The comic was a pretty simple idea as it needed to be given the built in limitations of the engine. a more complex comic would have needed to be bigger and building one of this modest size was still a considerable time sink. It measures 30 blocks across and 19 blocks high. For reference to non minecraft players, your character is 2 blocks high. so in game it looks impressively big. If I had it to do again I would swap panel 1 and 2 to make the punchline stronger but I don’t think I will fix it in game because its a lot of work.

I found this comic really creatively satisfying to create. I think its because its a really limited media, and the limitations are inspiring creative ways to work within them. The technical challenges of getting it built were fun in themselves. I had to use graph paper in order keep track of which blocks needed to go where, while I was building the comic it was impossible to actually see what I was building, my view was restricted to just what blocks where on the top of the stack while I was standing on them. The hardest part was dealing with the day/night cycle. I guess it was a bit like a real construction project in that sense, except that even if I had found a solution to properly light it to see I still ran the risk of creepers coming along and destroying my monument to them.

The build would have been drastically simplified if instead of building it tall I had made it flat on the ground. I would have then been working on the face of the comic and seen what I was doing. It also would make tweaking it easier, the skin tone was made of sand one of the few blocks that have a sense of gravity so editing the face meant a lot of extra work as erasing a sand block meant the other sandblocks moved down and I had to delete the entire column. I also would have died a lot less building it.

However I think I would have missed out on my next minecraft comic idea. I want to take advantage of the fact that when you look at the comic from the opposite side then what was intended you see a mirror copy of the comic to do something clever. I want to make a comic where it can be read from either side and still work as a comic. Thats pretty close to the ultimate use of the tool, before I start needing to learn how to work with logic gates. I guess I could also have taken advantage of the 3d nature of the game to make something like the explosion in 3d but thats just kind of tacky really.

And then one day maybe I’ll make comics on paper again.