Making of "Lore Dump" (Patreon)

My oldest likes to lore dump about his current hyper-fixation. This is all perfectly fine and good when it's something creative, or sciencey, or with a bit of story -but then there's Geometry Dash.

It's the dumbest sort of platformer. Your cube character moves forward by itself and you just press space to jump. You hit an obstacle and you go back to the start to do it all over again. As you can imagine, this results in a lot of "IT'S NOT FAIR!" meltdowns.

Now admittedly it's not all bad. The music is pretty good and there's a level creator where people have made some genuinely jaw dropping things, but along with that comes the lore. I don't mind watching the occasional cool level my kid wants to show me, but for a few weeks of summer, literally all he would talk about was Geometry Dash and it was driving us insane.

On the upside though, I finally had a topic to fill in this comic idea in my notes!

*V lore dumping* 

F pokes V’s head: Unsubscribe. Mute. Block 

J: Wow, he's super annoying today, huh? 

F: You say that every day! 

My kid has a good sense of humor about himself so I have jokingly used "Unsubscribe! Mute! Block!" before. I really do my best to indulge him, but sometimes he'll get trapped in a loop and I need a way to save us both! 😂 I'll also bop his head and say "Pause" when I go to the loo and "Play" when I come out! That one works really well!

I tried writing down some Geometry Dash lore-dumps from the kids (the little one was giving it his all too!) but despite it feeling like they went on forever, there was never enough usable text. I needed a huge chunk to make this work, so I went to Grok for help. Sorry, I know that's not always a popular decision, 😅 but for spitting out walls of rambling text, it's kind of undefeated! I wasn't quite sure yet how the text would work (just a wall, or in speech bubbles?) so I put it faded in the background while I worked on the characters.

Fran does a lot of wide eyed gritting her teeth at Vincent and I worry about it getting too repeatitive. After a few goes at drawing it fresh here, I remembered Fran's pose in the bonus panel to this comic. I brought the lines over and de-frazzled her fur. I wanted to make it look like she'd been there listening a while, so I dropped the mouth rather than doing the usual gritted teeth smile.

In the final panel I remembered the Pop Cat Meme I'd done a little while ago. The meme itself is a little odd looking because it's copying the photoshopped style of the original, but it was the right direction, so I drew a new one in my artstyle. I loved how it came out, so I went back and made Vincent in panel 2 more of an inbetween of 1 and 3.

With the characters in place, it was time to figure out exactly how Vincent's lore dump would be illustrated. The composition of the final panel made me think of a sprinkler; like he was spewing words out from the middle. I drew the speech bubble in a water spout sort of shape and deformed the words to match. I liked it, so I added a speech bubble outline to the first panel too. The 2nd panel was a bit more of a problem being speech bubbles over and speech bubble, so I added a bit of blue to separate them.

That's when I discovered the deform tool could be set to have more nodes on it than I realized! Previously it had always been 4, but I added some more and although it goes by fast in the timelapse, spent a while squishing and stretching the words in the bubbles. I really wanted this feeling that the lore dump spraying out and wrapping around everyone -because that's what it feels like IRL! 😄

I am happy to report after all this we managed to get oldest off Geometry Dash and onto a some different, much more interesting, hyper-fixations! Currently getting my ear talked off about coding a conveyer belt game, which is a million times better than the brainrot that is Geometry Dash! 🤪