My new game comic, The Empty Kingdom, in now live on the Interwubs for your perusal. This one is a little different from Duck and Icarus – while it’s a bit adventure-gamey and does draw on my memories of MMOs, it maybe sits best in the genre that RPS likes to call “walking simulators.” Only you’re walking around inside a comic with your headphones on and there are these little alien dinosaurs and… anyway. Have a play and let me know what you think?
Once you’ve had a play you might also want to listen to the chat I had with Fredrik Rysjedal for the Norwegian comics podcast, Teiknesamtalen. We had a good talk (in English, since my Norwegian is rather limited) about some of the ideas behind The Empty Kingdom and my wider thoughts and experiences of digital comics as a whole. I think it ended up being quite a useful discussion of the emerging digital comics form, so will hopefully be of interest for those of you who are into that sort of thing.
While I’m thinking about it, those folk might also like to check out these two reports of the Electricomics panel at Thought Bubble. I think the panel finally succeeded at getting the message out as to what we’re actually trying to achieve with the research project, and I was very pleased to see this reflected in Asher and Hannah‘s excellent coverage.
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[…] Invisibility or evasion? Roll a six-sided dice and post the result to the comments thread or tweet it to @merlism. Rolls will be tallied on Thursday and the result shown on Friday. And also, have a play of my new game comic, The Empty Kingdom. More details over here. […]
You call this a ‘game comic’.
In your mind is it a game rendered in comic format (as a ‘Choose your way adventure’ was a game rendered in a book format), or more a comic with game functionality.
Or is the distinction meaningless and it simply is what it is? As a long term fan and admirer of your work I ask out of interest in your creative process.
Many thanks,
AP.
Hi Ash,
I consider ‘game comics’ (or the best examples of game comics) to be games where the mechanics of the gameplay make use of the key characteristics of the comics form.
Because I’ve been making these as part of my current doctoral study, I’ve actually been having to think about this stuff probably a bit more than is healthy. There’s a decent summary of my research in this area in the talk I gave about Icarus and Duck, over here: http://bambuser.com/v/5016894
Hey. I played your game and I thought it was beautiful. Easy to play and could definitely display the story behind it. Its one of the games we need more of
Hi there~ Somehow I got from Rusty Lake games to your game on Armor Games. I loved it! What other
recommendations do you have for this type of game or genre?
Happy regards.
I absolutely LOVE empty kingdom. I played it on armour games years ago when I was a child obsessed with that site. I recently found the bookmark on my old computer, and playing it again as an anxious teen is so wonderful and calming! I love the ambient music/sound effects and the art style. My brother criticizes me because it’s ‘not a real game’, but he just doesn’t appreciate how lovely it is. 🙂
I am currently procrastinating and finally had the patience to actually read the credits (but not enough to do my homework apparently) and discovered your middle name is Merlin, which is super cool! So I came to your website and played Duck and Icarus, and they are both really neat. I also read the ghost webcomic thing. I was initially planning just on reading a few pages or whatever but I just kept clicking next!
Congratulations on becoming Doctor Comics. Good bye!
[…] plus approfondie des contenus, tous les participants ont partagé la lecture de deux Å“uvres (The Empty Kingdow et The Plan) qu’ils ont ensuite critiquées et interprétées.Ensuite, ils ont collectivement […]