I normally don’t do this at a whim because I find it rude, but you directly requested it. I just read through it for you, and here is how I feel, and what I think you can do to better yourself and your quest.

Positives:
* Your art is very colorful, and your backgrounds are exquisite, and detailed.
* The world is set-up very clearly, and you have a clear goal.
* Your characters are interesting and have exposed flaws and weaknesses rather than just accentuated emotions and abilities, which have advantages in themselves rather than being true problems.
* You spent a while hosting the game before implementing an element in the game to negate Spikesby’s communication problem in the slightest.
* You use dice to determine outcomes. In my opinion that’s a really good element to commit to because it allows for a more interesting scenario.
* You read your readers’ suggestions and do your best to appeal to them.
* Your writing is clear, and establishes a mood.
* http://www.tgchan.org/kusaba/questarch/src/125156964538.gif This. Although there aren’t many frames, it’s a colored animation, and possibly my favorite moment in the Quest, in tandem with when he lowers down and speaks to Spikesby. The detail, and effort in the artwork was more than worth it.

Things to try and improve, possibly:
* Spikesby’s default standing pose, as well as the rest of the cast. Although I do appreciate the art, the color, and the backgrounds I do have to say something about this. The beginning of the game all the way up to the present with some very minor changes, Spikesby is pretty much just slid around on a monorail in the same pose. You do a lot of other pics, closeups, and different angles (rarely), but it all comes back to that picture of the chatacter(s). I realize this is/can be done to hurry up the game, and post more updates…
* Your chapters are very short. I can guess that you are cutting them off per session, and approximately ten pictures is about as much as you can handle in a sitting, but you could always leave it and come back to the game. The span of the cliffhanger to the next cliffhanger almost feels forced because not much has happened in between the two.
* For every picture you post, there’s an extreme amount of dialogue. In addition to that sometimes you reuse the same picture to further the dialogue and wait for events to occur. I don’t recommend you stop writing, but I have noticed that a majority of the quests with art that move a little quicker have minimal writing. Even though your pictures are fairly colorful and detailed, you almost seem to be compensating with writing for some unknown reason.
* Your scenes are very static. We’re (virtually) always observing Spikesby, the party, and enemies as if it were either a very old RPG, or a very old side scrolling beat ‘em up. It would be nice to see different angles, and dynamic shots of the characters and the background/environment they are in.
* Constant cues. Although very minor, I notice that you ask what to do directly in quite a lot of your posts. There are a lot of quests, and I would guess by now your players know that once you’ve posted they need to suggest what is to be done.
* Interactivity: There seem to be three things to do in the quest, and even if you are doing a good job, it would be difficult to feel compelled. Deliver item, Fight, and Have conversations being the three things. People want to be immersed in the game whether it’s by being inside of a very well drawn and written quest, or being able to control a large portion of the game itself. You’re pretty much stating in and out of game that you really want the players to guide Spikesby but there are only so many things we can suggest per situation or post.

That’s all I can think of. I wouldn’t expect you to agree with everything, or even to implement it all even if you did. Change can take time, and people love your quest—Heartsbane is the face of tgchan right now. You might be noticing that you have faults, but you’re definitely not down and out.

Keep working hard.

I know I can't speak for everyone else, but at the moment I admit to feeling a bit intimidated by the setting. It's a large, colourful, and detailed setting, but we are frequently introduced to things, without knowledge of whether or not they'll be important; IE: We have a whole lot of fluff, but everything is so detailed that we don't know if detail A will be relevant later, or if it's just there for flavour. You could call it a bit of information overload.

For example, I'll try (at my own embarrassment) to recall exactly what I can remember from BiteQuest and its characters.

-We are Spikesby Biteface. We're a cute yellow wizard-minion called a Snikt with blades for arms that goes 'Wak wak wak wak wak!' ... we were not created with a soul, but aspire to get one, and we can do this by either being really really evil bastards (for an evil soul?) or really really good. And we've already got a foot in the door for the good path anyway.

-In the desert, we met an... Ophia, was it? A pink snakey chick, who needed our help. And we helped her, by stabbing bad things to death. Wak wak wak! I believe we ended up taking her to an oasis then, where we met a Gour (?) who wanted to exact some sort of revenge on a certain wizard by trashing his minions. I think. Anyway, we helped him, and he was kinda surprised that we did.

-We eventually wound up in this weird city with blood sigils on the walls and a demon-wizard-girl-thing up in a tower who was bleeding forever. This area seems so detailed that it feels like it should be a plot point, but honestly if it is, it's not a very intuitive one.

-There's a girl with a mask who has weird blood named Glory! We saved her from some weird... demon thingie. She's following us now. She's an adept, though I don't recall off the top of my head what that means, and she has gold shimmery blood. She had something 'taken from her' when she became an adept; some players have joked it must be her 'common sense', but I suspect it may be something like 'courage' or 'confidence'.

-We found this weird snakey drippy thing in an abandoned town en route to Radia, and it seemed amiable, though I have no idea if it was good or bad or what. It also spoke very slowly, which is a bit irritating to read.

-We found Radia! She's a bitch who makes things love her and then kills em. We helped a vulture thing that can't kill things directly eat a suffering guy, and all I can wonder there is 'was putting him out of his misery a Good thing, or are we headed down the Dark side? :<'

-Freakin' Bitch TOOK OUR EYE. MOTHER OF FUCK!

... so yeah. I think one of the core problems is that we are introduced to a new, unique, magical critter seemingly every chapter, and we have trouble remembering what is and isn't important. For example, I remember when the black goopy tentacle creature appeared in the city, I was sitting here, sipping my tea, going '... well, what now? What's this about an antimagic sea at the end of the world? Why haven't we heard about this before now?' And I don't really have many suggestions because I'm too busy thinking about Radia, and Glory, and how can we help Glory, and about Spikesby's soul, and whether or not that freaky city with the bleeding wizard trapped in a tower is going to be important later.

Essentially, what I'm getting at is the Law of Conservation of Detail ( http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheLawOfConservationOfDetail ). The world is very, very detailed, but rather than encountering an entirely new race with every encounter, could we instead find out a little more about something we're already familiar with? Or about characters we're already familiar with. Perhaps we encounter an adept who had something else taken from them, and then the concept of 'adept' in BiteQuest is expanded a bit, and possibly important details (like the idea that they lose something, or an idea of what type of trait is applicable to 'something) can be cemented among readers.

I adore your creativity as a quest author, but I believe the quest would benefit most from depth of detail rather than breadth of detail.

Just my thoughts.

>The beginning of the game all the way up to the present with some very minor changes, Spikesby pretty much just slid around on a monorail in the same pose.

This is my biggest gripe with it. I stopped reading it around the first thread because that just seemed so damn lazy that I figured the author couldn't be assed to draw anything else, and would just do zoom in/outs of that one pose for everything, unless he drew it beforehand.

>>314334
I guess I'll just say that I never really had a problem with the art. I'm kinda surprised to hear that some people have.

>>314335
I thought the legs were funky, but that's about it.
On the whole, great job.

This applies to all quests:

Give us some direction. Putting us in a room with nothing obvious or no options does not a quest make.

I'll use the latest Romanticar as an example. We're an asocial nerd, school just let out. Okay, let's go home then. Oh, wait, we got suckered into delivering a box, okay, let's deliver it.

Oh hey we ran into a half naked gir- oh wait she's gone now. Now that that's done... what else? continue original plan of "go home"? I guess.

I'm sure Reaver had a great story planned out, but there just didn't seem to be anyway to GET to that story.

>>314335
I would like to clarify that I'm not saying the art is bad, I'm saying that copy/pasting seemed lazy and I assumed that the lazy art was the sign of a bad artist.

I can't comment on the art because I stopped reading the quest a dozen posts in.

Thanks a whole lot for everybody who commented, especially Insomnia and f4963f for your detailed responses.

I want to respond to a couple of things, not to excuse some of the deficiencies, but to sort of explain why I can't change some of them:

The Art
The first thing is the art. I totally agree that I reuse frames and sprites. Now, for the guy that only read the first 12 or so frames, I was way worse about it in the beginning that I am now. I predraw all my backgrounds beforehand, and the static "side scrolling" poses, but none of the portraits or action shots. I drew all of the abandoned city on the fly, though.

The reason for the short chapter and reused poses is that I have only about 6-8 hours a week in which I can run the quest, and it's pretty impossible for me to break this time up or extend it. I generally spend an hour or two predrawing and 4-6 hours running the session. I have to take some art shortcuts to be able to accomplish this. If I had to redraw a fully colored and shaded picture for every frame or action, there is no way I'd be able to get any reasonable amount of story progression in a 4-6 hour session.

That being said, I've been trying to make things more dynamic, and not reuse as much, but it is going to be somewhat inevitable because of my schedule.

I personally don't like pause screens, so I'd rather just do a clear ending picture than a pause screen, especially if it is going to be paused for a whole week, even if the ending point isn't neccisarily a clear or appropriate stopping point.

I'm glad that people liked the animation and the Ryxix picture! I love doing the animations, and I think they add a lot to any quest that includes them. I don't know how many other things like that I'll be able to do, as my free time will only be reduced until Christmas, but I'll certainly try.

The Story

I can certainly agree that there is a lot going on, and honestly I figured people would actually post theories and ask questions in the discussion thread. Part of the quest is learning what the hell is going on in the world, and none of the details (Kshaara and the Sea of Oblivion) are irrelevant. Spikesby knows only a little more about the world than the players do.

I created a Q&A thread so that I could explain more stuff without wasting time and typing even more than I do in the actual thread, but no one has used it at all, really.



A few things that should have been figured out by now:

Normal people can't do magic. They can sacrifice either a mental characteristic or a body part to one of the Wizards and become an Adept, who has access to magical powers.

Heartsbane gave up his arm to Ryxix
The Ophian in Suri gave up her Compassion to Kshaara
Glory gave up her ??? to ???

There was a war a long time ago between the Wizards that killed most of them and ruined the world. All that is left is a little peninsula that has an ocean on one side, and a black wall of shadows on the side that theoretically leads to the rest of the continent.

Wizards live in towers and can make all kinds of crazy monsters that have no souls, but can develop them over time by thinking for themselves instead of just following orders. Everything without a soul can communicate with everything else without a soul, and things without souls can readily identify one another as such. Wizards can communicate with anything.

I've tried not to state any of the important plot points outright, as the whole point is kinda for people to figure it out for themselves. The endgame depends on what they understand and how they use this knowledge.

The interactions are a little simple, yeah, but the 'talk' and 'fight' options aren't just two buttons like in an RPG. What Spikesby says and how he attacks drastically alter the outcome of the encounters. There is pretty much always a really terrible result that gets somebody killed for pretty much every encounter.

That being said, I can understand some stuff getting kinda old. The idea behind the courier missions was to let the players learn about the world by guiding them through it.

Anyway, thanks for commenting. Please go ahead and respond to my response if you think I'm way off track or doing something overall with this stuff that is just a bad idea or whatever.

If I had to redraw a fully colored and shaded picture for every frame or action, there is no way I'd be able to get any reasonable amount of story progression in a 4-6 hour session.

This has turned out to be the truest thing I've ever typed. I really don't know what to do.

>>333491
Well, I think your quest would lose a lot if it lost the colour. Maybe you can scrimp on shading if you keep the outlines sharp like on the thread 5 title card?

>>333491
Uuuuuuh.

Flat color everything? I have no idea, I'm bad at updating in a timely fashion myself. :x

>>333491
It's hard to restrain yourself, but it can be, no, it IS a virtue.

When you sit in front of your image and you think "just a little detail here", JUST STOP YOURSELF.

If you want to make a quest with great art, good.

But if you want to advance your story, you have to set a "deadline". Yes, you could design a more fancy piece of cloth for this NPC. But should you?

It's up to every author to decide. And as I said, sometimes DRAWING LESS IS A VIRTUE. It depends on what you want to achieve, realistically.

Randomly leave stuff uncolored?

Set an egg timer to 10 minutes for the shading phase? When you're done, you're done!

>>333492
>>333494
>>333505

In order from most to least time, it is lineart, planning the image, then color, then backgrounds, then shading. I don't think it has ever taken me more than maybe four minutes to shade a picture. My current update rate seems to be slightly over an hour per image. This seems to me to be fairly untenable as far as reasonably progressing the story. Having gotten "better" at art, it's hard to leave gross anatomy errors or draw everything from the same perspective. I guess I could just not clean up the lineart ever or something.

Personally, not cleaning the lineart makes more work during coloring for me. And scribbly lines don't look as nice with color, in my opinion.

But then, MSPaint doesn't have layers.

Only comment I have is update speed, but I have no room to talk there, and you explained that.

Oh wow, this thread is a year old. You've been here a long time, Bite.

>>333543
I am old as dirt.