Extras & Thanks
This is just a little section for little treasures that a fan might find interesting. You'll also see here my credits to others, and perhaps a few interesting links.
Past CYOAs
These are the most recently discontinued stories, and also the longest. They don't exactly have endings, because I kept telling myself I was going to continue them, but now I'm all but certain it won't happen. Still, I can't bring myself to kill off three beloved characters. Note that these CYOAs will have at the top of every page the old site header, so the buttons are going to look a little different and lead to different things. I left them as they are just because it would take me some tedious work to make them conform with the current header... Just go back to this extras page when you're ready to return to the present.
Way back around February 2007 on Ragdollsoft, what would be 3/5 of the way through Chapter 6 of The Monk's Adventure, the thread went on a little discourse. I was pretty bored of The Monk at that point, so I thought I'd see how a few other characters might go. Maybe there would be one that started going better than The Monk's, but I think in the end people just wanted to stick with the original. These discourses are the reason now that, although The Monk's CYOA started before The Pirate's, there are more scenes done for The Pirate than The Monk.
First up is The Chef. To be honest, the chef's short adventure is one of my favorite stories, if not my absolute favorite story of all the CYOAs. I really do think he had a lot of potential, but judging by the way people had an evident desire to sabotage his life so often, I eventually made this one come to an end. And unlike The Cop's, I didn't leave it open-ended so that it might continue (ironic since I liked The Chef better) but perhaps someday the world might see "THE CHEF 2: REVENGE OF THAT GUY WHO GOT TACKLED AND NEARLY KILLED BY THE CHEF." So anyway... Here is The Chef's whole story in one big long super-chapter.
Now here is The Cop. His segment began literally right there at the end of The Chef's. In the beginning, I thought cop guy had a lot of potential to be funny and amusing, but as the story went on, I and others just got more and more tired of him, just in the short time that he existed. Clearly everybody wanted The Monk to make his grand return... And it wasn't belong after this grand return that this site came to be. So anyway, here's another long super-chapter for you (though The Cop's super-chapter is barely longer than a normal chapter).
Director Commentary
On occasion I'll put on my headset, get CamStudio running, and draw the illustration of the week while giving my own input on everything I'm doing. Here you can see the couple times I've done it. Note that these are about an hour in length, so make sure you set aside a good chunk of time. Also note that I've been known to use mildly foul language at times, so if you're opposed to that, don't watch... Pansy.
(ACTUALLY THIS ONE DISAPPEARED. It was on Putfile, but apparently everything on Putfile has been erased and going to that site will instead take you to ebaumsworld. Is there anything they WON'T steal?)
Average Guy Scene 11
Avatars
USE THESE EVERYWHERE!!! THEY MAKE YOU COOL!
Since the Extras section is already pretty image-heavy, the avatars are sorted into four different pages. Choose your path:
Pirate
Average Guy
Shepry And Koen
Signatures
Just like the avatars, USE THESE EVERYWHERE!!! THEY MAKE YOU COOL! ALSO LINK TO THE SITE!
I made these in Photoshop and used them on a few forums, including a link to the site. Not sure how much publicity it got me, but we can only hope it's substantial. It would be totally cool if you follow in my footsteps and use at least one of these images on some kinda forum. Also preferably the second one, since it mentions Shepry And Koen.
New signatures and probably some avatars will be added here in the future. They aren't Priority 1 right now though, since I don't imagine demand is immensely great for such things.
Scrapbook
First of all, here are a couple of promotional images I made for the CYOAs. Since I made the new buttons in the chapter indexes, these became obsolete. The first one I made was for The Pirate as a project in my high school web design class. It's done with Fireworks, and the one for The Monk was just made in Photoshop to accompany The Pirate's when the site first started. The Average Guy doesn't have one because his story didn't get far enough before the site overhaul.
Nerdy Trivia: There has never been a point in the story where The Pirate has both the bandana and the machete, so this image is historically inaccurate!
There's also no point in the story where The Monk has the jelly monster along with the other pictured items, so that's another historically inaccurate image!
Here are a couple of navigational buttons I was going to use when the site first started. I scrapped them for something snazzier, and now they have something even cooler in their place. I only made two before switching to the new idea.
These are the navigational buttons used until the recent site update. They were put in a sidebar, and each one had the name of its section right below it. I decided these "orbs" seemed kinda unrelated to their subject matter, so now we have a picture more related to the section with a similar color scheme.
This banner went at the top of the old site. It's utter crap.
This is a rejected banner for the current site layout. I decided it would be better to have text that I made myself. There's an overlay on this title of various screencaps from the first two Shepry & Koen comics.
This is the full image used in the Extras & Thanks button at the top of every page. It's not the full size though. You can click it for the full size, but I should warn you it's a monstrous 2000 x 1800 pixels, 1.16 MB of Photoshop goodness.
Here's where I got the forum button's image. It was made as a parody of the way the Blitwise forum users react when a spambot posts a thread.
Four "Extras" buttons I decided not to use:
These are some VERY early drawings of Shepry, when she was basically a Photoshop doodle. You can see that she starts off very simple, then the vest gets added along with an earring. The earring was too difficult to do efficiently in Photoshop, and I figured I'd forget to add it all the time, so I decided to just go with the vest + belt. You can also see that her hair color changed to a reddish brown, and her hat color changed to green. I didn't want her to have blonde hair because I thought she'd bear too much resemblance to a certain forest pixie. Also a more normal shoe color... I was actually going to give her purple eyes until shortly before the first comic was made.
Here's another early picture of Shepry and Koen. Koen changed very little from his original design. The only change, really, is his hat color. Green was another color considered for him, but clearly Shepry had dibs on it.
This is the VERY first comic strip appearance of Shepry And Koen. I'm not gonna lie... I'm not really proud of this. Some people don't get it. That's probably because it's not a good joke. This was my final stab at comic strip humor. The illustrations of this comic are VERY awkward, especially in panel 1. In a way it's good though, because the first real comic didn't have to look this bad. I don't really even think it's funny anymore, but it was hilarious when I was thinking it up.
Here's the old serial comic version of Shepry and Koen. I ended this because the pictures were taking me way too long and still didn't feel satisfying at the end of the day. Until I get up to this point with the written story, you can look ahead at things that are yet to happen. If you're reading this, and the written story actually is up to this point, it's because I totally forgot to change this paragraph.
This is an image of Monk scene 20 that had to be deleted due to a misreading. Ragdollmaster originally posted that the baby jelly monster should be thrown off the cliff, so the parent was about to jump down the cliff after it, pulling The Monk down with it. I didn't see that he had made a second post amending his suggestion, drew up the whole original, put it online and everything, then I realized it was wrong and remade it.
Nerdy Trivia: The comment I made when posting this said "Doesn't anybody around here edit posts?" This is both a reference to my desire for Ragdollmaster to have edited his post rather than making a new one, and to the fact that I had to edit the original post I had made. If only they had known!
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This picture is the product of a bored night on the computer with Photoshop opened up. It's a remake of one panel of Shepry and Koen with those two dressed like pirates. More specifically, Koen's dressed as the pirate captain, and Shepry's dressed as the star pirate. I'd like to do more pictures of them dressed in some more sorts of exotically themed costumes, but I probably oughta stick to the real thing... If I do end up making things like this more often, maybe it'll even get its own little section.
Links
Here is the original thread in which The Monk's story started.
Here is the original thread in which The Pirate's story started.
Here you can download one of the fonts I used, "20th Century Font."
Here you can download another font I used, "Spastic Nerfbag."
Thanks
Thanks to my brother for helping me get the site online, and other miscellaneous technological help.
My high school web page design teacher, Mrs. Hut for teaching me much of the HTML I utilized in this site.
Microsoft and Adobe, for Paint and Photoshop, respectively
Cave Story and Kim Wilde for a few obscure references.
Every user who contributed to the CYOAs
And especially every user who signed up for my forum! I love you the most!
Copyright 2007-2009 Trooth