Comic #192: Direction Dance (Patreon)

Originally Published: June 7th, 2009.

If you're wondering why I had Gigz & Keydar do a little flip and turn their back to the viewer in panel 3 and 11, there was a whole weird history to it. It seems pretty silly in hindsight, but I remember at the time I was overly worried about what direction to make them turn when they clicked their directional buttons and I vastly overthought the entire comic.

Basically, the issue was that I wanted them to turn left with A/left arrow and right with D/right arrow, but I knew if they were facing the screen I would have to make them turn the opposite direction, and for some reason I thought that would be confusing for the reader, so I had them both start with their back to the viewer instead. Then I started overthinking which direction they would go when they pressed "forward" and decided to move them towards the screen, and confused the entire process even further.

Really the whole comic was just a way for me to call Keydar a dummy for using arrow keys instead of WASD, but I couldn't think of a good way to have in-game characters refer to the buttons they were pressing, so I came up with a weird "direction dance" premise. To be fair, I'm not sure I can think of another way to do it.

I did end up doing a meta comic years later with Donald involving keyboard buttons that I was much happier with (#520).

But hilariously after the comic I learned there was an entire group of ESDF gamers that take direction keys way more seriously than I could have ever imagined.