Comic #994: Reality Bites: Part Three (Patreon)

Out of all the episodes in this arc, this one has had the most edits so far. I had so many versions of that final panel over the past few weeks, and I finally settled on this one. I knew what format I wanted from the beginning, basically they would be complaining about all the ways that reality was worse than fantasy, and the final panel would reveal something that reality does better.

Originally the final panel was going to reveal a ring tooltip with a sell price of a couple million dollars. This was a pretty good final panel, but unfortunately making them millionaires kind of sent the entire arc off the rails. Them being rich kind of made certain conflicts coming up a little too easy and I didn't want to deal with that. I also considered having them marvel at a flush toilet or something, but decided to settle on armor stacking.

I had a lot of fun coming up with tooltips for these items. The pet battle was a late addition. I was originally going to have that panel have someone saying their bags sucked, with a tooltip showing a 3 slot bag. But in the end I felt like this wasn't really a good characterization of how bags worked in real life, so I decided to go with battle pets. I also struggled initially because I was having Nyte complain about battle pets not battling, which is something that's kind of happening in-game right now. I then realized I could literally have someone mention that to her in the panel, which ended up being a funny throw away joke. I briefly considered making that the punchline, but I felt it worked better as a side joke than the main joke.

Once again the stock images worked well here. It was a little tricky to find the perfect ones though. The last two comics had them effectively in a castle/dungeon setting, and I needed to transition them into more of a town/market setting. So I found a nice cobblestoned alleyway with some storefronts that worked nicely for most of the comic.

It also worked out nicely that there was a nice doorway in the center of the frame. I struggled a bit with having Krom in such a different background than the rest of the characters, so I was pleasantly surprised to discover I could just have Krom's speech bubble pop out of the doorway in the penultimate panel.

A couple callbacks in this one. The cat in panel three is originally from #804, and Keydar's animated jazz hands in panel 5 were most recently used in #985.