Comic #993: Reality Bites: Part Two (Patreon)

Look, as promised, I got rid of the rings! I did almost forget to draw Narya's bracer on the final panel though. I had to add it last minute.

Usually with newer arcs I've tried to drop a bit of exposition at the start so readers can get a sense of the plot even if they haven't read part one, but it's so clunky. I figure I'd rather cater to readers who are going to read it all than those that will only read one. So I decided to just pick up exactly where part one left off.

I realized on the last comic that the background on the final panel was a bit too light and desaturated. It made it a little hard to see which is a problem when the punchline relies on you noticing the background is real. I primarily desaturate the backgrounds of most comics so that the characters will pop better into the foreground. However, my drawn characters are always going to pop against real scenery, so the desaturation isn't really necessary. So you might notice this week's comic has a background that's a bit more dark and saturated.

I also made a bit of an error in part one that trickled down to part two. I originally planned on having stats on Narya's bracers. When I was drawing part one last week, I decided to cut out the stats to make the tooltip more readable and take up less space. However, Narya's original dialogue in panel 4 of this week's comic was, "WHERE DID THE STATS GO?!" As I was drawing this week's comic I realized the bracers didn't have any stats.

My original plan was for the bracers to still have the same name as the original, same rarity, only with no stats and a slightly different on use effect: "Turn the dial to make a nice whirring sound". In the end I decided to just turn the bracers into a basic non magical item that exists in the real world, and give it flavor text instead of an on use effect. I think it ended up being a funner idea than the original plan.