Shattered Realities: Looking to Make a Comic with Plot that Replicates One Playing with Toys as a Kid

Hi, it's the dumbass. The dumbass is me.

I've been wanting to make a comic for quite some time now, though the urge to create a story that is my own has existed throughout my entire life. As a kid I always wanted to be an author/illustrator (yes, both at once, if you can believe it). Looking back, it's surprising that I wasn't much of a comic reader, I read more books than I read comics back then (now I have the opposite problem, where if I'm not reading Tv Tropes, I'm reading a webcomic). Not that I didn't have ANY exposure to comics, as a friend of mine had a huge-ass book containing all of the BONE series, but it was smaller than the amount of books I read.

Luckily, I was given the gifts... of a shitload of pencils, too much paper, and a stapler. I made my own books. In my earlier days of doing this, it was to actually create a "book" of sorts, with predictable results... For context, I could only draw stick figures with box bodies, and their proportions were way out of whack.

Later on, I shifted my focus towards what I called "BookGames" at the time, which was essentially me just coping with the fact that I didn't own a lot of the games I wanted to play (and even if I did, I had my own ideas for them). That's for a later discussion, though. Maybe a Ramble.

The point is, that I want to make stuff. It's mostly changed from wanting to author books to drawing comics, but the idea is the same.

Years ago, to cure my boredom while I was in school (or maybe just at home), I made a little game on a folded piece of paper, though I should really call it more of a sandbox due to its nature, and what I did with it.

It was called the Civilization Project (sometimes stylized as "Civillization," because I didn't remember how many L's were in the word). The idea was that there were four territories in the corners of the paper (symbolizing the map), and thus had four "players" (which was just me playing with myself, so I played everyone). There wasn't really a goal to it; really, I meant it when I called it "more of a sandbox."

I lack the papers now (because I threw them away), but here's a mockup of what the map of one of these looked like:

As you can see, it's both not a lot and super a lot all at the once. Despite this being a mockup, I put attention into showing what I had some of these players doing. There's some sort of story here. It's been half-assed because I was trying to show what one of these looked like, but I could tell you what has happened, what all of these drawings mean, and what their ideas were.

I'm not going to, because this isn't about the Civilization Project in full. But, it was a stepping stone into what happens next.

I had made a few creatures for this idea that I had kept, the main one being what has been dubbed the "Derp," AKA those spheres with two big dot eyes and a small beady nose. I soon wanted to expand upon the idea, so I tried making a game out of it.

It didn't come to fruition, but I did get new ideas out of it.

At some point, I was essentially making a bestiary with all the creatures, all within the same universe. This universe I called Merra, which is what happens when you replace the T in Terraria with an M (like in Minecraft), but then you remove the "ria" part. I know, such a dumb way to make a name, but it also further supports the idea that it has now become a sandbox.

Eventually, I scrapped it all. I still kept a lot of the creature designs and names within my brain, but at some point I stopped messing with that world...

Until I didn't anymore. But it wouldn't be called by either name ever again.

Shattered Realities is essentially Civilization Project 2.0. At the moment, I've figured out that the idea came from, at its earliest, 2021. I believe a lot of the ideas were to make what I had before into more of a roguelike. The basic concept was that the world was shattered, and each map was a "fragment" of the world, AKA a randomly-generated map that you would have to explore. There's some other stuff too, but that isn't important right now.

Shattered Realities over time became more of a loose idea. It still has a lot of the core concepts there, but much like my other ideas that reach this point, I still haven't done anything with them. At the moment, Shattered Realities has a bunch of creatures within a shattered world, that's all.

So from conception, the Civilization Project / Merra Universe was all about being a Sandbox. It was being worldbuilt in a strange way, but it worked out by having everything just synergizing with each other. While I am not sure what elements I want to keep right now, I do want to get into that mindset of just fucking goofing around with something and making it happen.

Have you ever played with your toys? Your imaginary friends?

I did, a lot. Too much, in fact. But I can surely say that I created a lot of wacky and fun stories with them.

I feel most of this is for two reasons. One, as you played with your toys and shit, you give them their own personality, and soon you have a group of them interact with each other. It's fun to have their characters get along or fight profusely with each other. Two, you don't give much of a shit with the weird plot and settings and the rules. You either made up everything, used your surroundings as inspiration in regards to stuff like what biome certain rooms could be, or the fact they are small and in rooms of a house were just incorporated into what story you had.

I enjoy character design and personalities. So much so, in fact, that a lot of my OC's kinda stay in their one general idea/universe because I imagine using them for that purpose at one point. I feel like I've gotten pretty good at giving them good and realistic banter with each other, so I have some level of confidence that I can make an entertaining story with some original characters.

The only thing I have trouble with is the setting and rules. I still need to care about them, it just needs to be about the consistency, not more strict stuff. That, I can work on later. For now, my main focus is on creating some characters that the new Shattered Realities is centered around.

How does one create an Original Character? It's just designing a character, from personality to design to fashion to powers (if they have any). It could be symbolic or meaningful, or maybe it's just stuff you find cool.

I want to emulate the idea that I'm playing with some toys or plushies again, so I want these characters to look like they don't fully belong with each other, but not be too out-of-place. To do this, I'm going to be taking some notes on characters I like in fiction, or some characters I get from character creation in certain games, and mix them all up. The resulting ideas are below:

A mysterious plague doctor, a knowledgeable masked girl, a friendly super soldier, a ticked-off animatronic puppet, an adventurous pumpkin, a scavenging furry, a friendly dark & light spirit, and a pacifistic cleric cursed to become a bloodthirsty dragon.

I think we can make something with this. Unfortunately, I have spent way too long working on this specific post. Granted, I think it's gotten too long anyway, especially before we got to the point of the entire post. So, I will leave it at that. Maybe next time, I will have the characters more fleshed out, and we can talk about the plan. For now, cya.