Just a friendly reminder that you can own my original stuff through this website.

And more…

The latest comic book by Mateusz Skutnik, co-founder of Pastel Games and creator of several acclaimed point-and-click flash games, now in English translation.

Blacky might seem to be just a regular guy but there is something very special about the way he looks at the world. Seen through his eyes, daily routines and things that tend to go unnoticed in a busy everyday life serve as triggers for reflection. It is a funny and thought-provoking collection of bitter-sweet observations on living in a big city, growing older and being a parent. Read it, but be warned – you will never look at a mug of cold coffee in the same way again.

The latest comic book by Mateusz Skutnik, co-founder of Pastel Games and creator of several acclaimed point-and-click flash games, now in English translation.

Oh boy. “After an hour you realise you made a cup of coffee!” THAT is the story of my life. Working on CBO and on all sorts of other comic projects the one thing I know is never going to change is making a hot cup of coffee, working and then realising it’s now a cold cup of coffee. Just happened.

Anyway, I’m getting off the subject of this post. This book is mad. You look at the cover and think it is going to contain eye-popping colour art. It doesn’t. It’s black and white on a curious lined background. (water colour paper?). The art has a scratchy quality in places and this works well with the ink washes (or it could be water colours reproduced as tones) and the story…it almost seems a very odd mish-mash….

But it is all completely mad and a bloody good fun read. I long ago gave up trying to work out why it is I like some things but not others and all I can say is that Black. Four Of Us just makes me looking at the art. Almost distracting with its washes, crinkly lines, stipling -look at the first page below!

I can see someone like Paul (Browner Knowle/Anon) Brown appreciating this type of thing. I’ve not seen anything quite like this -it has that European look but with “an edge”.

I really do hope Centrala are successful in the UK because that means we would see more of this type -or more unique- work. I think it might be a nice breath of fresh air!

Terry Hooper-Scharf

What I drew during this Autumn’s first parent-teacher meeting at school. Ballpoint on paper.

Welcome to the Subnet

I was struggling with the topic of this essay in its relation to René Descartes’ philosophies. I had a few ideas that I entertained but all of them came up short in terms of substance. Then, while thinking about what I was going to do at home, I was reminded of a tab I had saved on my internet browser for an update to a flash game that I have been playing since its initial release; Submachine! I was so excited when I thought about this game because I realized that it had a good parallel with Descartes’ philosophy of the Self, God, and the World. Submachine is a Flash game series created by Mateusz Skuntnik who, so far, has nine games released to play on the internet. They involve point-and-click and exploration mechanics that take you to a vast variety of different worlds. To “finish” the games the player must collect items and use them in specific places and find clues to help solve puzzles that can open up more locations to explore. Though Submachine relates to all three of Descartes’ factors, it relates to them in different ways.

The Self in Descartes’ philosophy and the player in the Submachine series is the only similar factor that stays consistent with both sides. To Descartes, the Self was the cogito and knowing that we exist. In Submachine, the player is represented as the cogito and is even described as a sort of messenger of the game’s God. In the game Subnet Exploration the player can find and read a letter that a scientist had left stating that M, we will talk about him later, has a new subject that he has been working with. This subject can be speculated as the player and later letters state that M has purposely led the subject astray to get lost in the world. This is the last similarity that is seen in both sides of the philosophy. The God and the World of Descartes are very different from Submachine, but it is easy to see how they can still relate in a “they exist” terms.

The God of the Submachine series is named Murtaugh, Mur, or just M. Since the game series is not fully completed, I cannot confirm my ideas about who M really is, but I can personally say that he is a two-faced, double-crosser, who is way too powerful for his own good. When the player first sees the name Murtaugh, it is just in a journal entry that he wrote. It describes how he mentally reached a new plane of thought and that he can see things made out of, what he calls, karma. The next interaction she has with M is an actual interaction. The player is on a computer with no keyboard and yet communication can still be made with M. he states that he is here to help us and that he knows of some coordinates, these will be discussed in the next paragraph, that may help us in our journey. By this time we are in the fourth game, Submachine: The Lab, but the truth finally comes out in the sixth game, Submachine: The Edge. This is why I do not like or trust Murtaugh anymore. The player finds out that Mur has been sending people into the Submachine, the actual machine in the game, and just leaving them there for his overall experiment. She also finds out that he purposefully sent her to the loop, a trap in the Submachine and the entire concept of the third game Submachine: The Loop, and did not think that she would survive. The very fact that M tried to kill us for an experiment and then acted as if he was our friend just rubs me the wrong way. Again, we may find out that M was actually a really good guy and others were just saying he was malicious to steer the player in the wrong direction. However, if Murtaugh is tricking the player and sending her to her doom, it shows that the Submachine’s God is not a perfect Being. I will say that in the case of the world of the Subnet, this type of being could still be considered God. In terms of Descartes, God exists because there is no sense experience of infinite or absolute or necessary Beings and by the causal principle the cause has to exceed the effect, so the idea of God can only be created by something as powerful as God himself. In Submachine, Murtaugh created the Submachine and the Subnet so we can say in parallel to this infinite type of world that it is indeed possible that an imperfect Being could naturally exist.

Speaking of the world of the Submachine games (finally), one of the greatest things about them is how crazy the world is. The science behind the Submachine itself appears to be infinite. The world of Submachine is called the Subnet and it consists of over 1,000 different possible locations in a single dimension. It has been stated in the game that there are multiple dimensions and some locations may appear identical to each other but they exist in a different space! The way the player can get to these combinations is with one of the more important features of the game. Submachine’s transporter device, the official name escapes me, is a very unique machine that has three slots for inputting the numbers 0 to 9 on it and those 1,000 groupings can teleport the player to anywhere in the Subnet. The Subnet, in itself, can also be described as infinite. As described above, each location is placed in a certain space in a certain dimension and multiple copies of said location can exist at the same time but may be in a different space. If anything, the Subnet is the most confusing part of the games. Also I need to mention that the Subnet is the world of the Submachine which is the overall mechanism that created the Subnet to exist. In theory, the Subnet would not exist without the Submachine which was invented by Murtaugh. Considering Descartes’ philosophy that the world we experience exists because we see it as it is and it is clear and distinct, one can tell that the Subnet is not exactly what Descartes might call as undoubtable. The world created from the Submachine can lie; there are even rooms that fall apart and some rooms that have teleportation portals that appear out of thin air. In general it can be safe to assume that the Subnet’s only truth is that there is more to discover than meets the eye. So the world of the Submachine games and the World of Descartes are complete opposites. One world must be clear to be real and one world is fuzzy and confusing but is still comprehended as true, in terms of the game play.

Author: Hollistyn

Zmiany, zmiany, zmiany.

Plan był w miarę prosty: namalować album do grudnia, wydać na gwiazdkę – profit i sława. Jednak niespodziewanie okazało się, że gwiazdkowy komiks wypadałoby skończyć przed grudniem, w sumie to na początku listopada, więc czasu zostało niewiele. Teoretycznie taki termin byłby do zrobienia, ale dwa czynniki zaważyły nad tym, że tak się jednak nie stanie.

1. Po rozpoczęciu prac, jakoś pod koniec września, zakładałem że zrobię po bożemu, jak Rosiński w Thorgalu, 46 stron i fajrant. Jednak po kilku pierwszych stronach stało się jasne, że raczej nie zmieszczę się w tej liczbie stron. Tak powiedzmy jest 50% szans że się zmieszczę. W tym momencie ten termin listopadowy już trochę pada na pysk. Drugi punkt kładzie go na deski.

2. Po zrobieniu siedmiu plansz NAGLE okazało się, że wszystkie są, co tu dużo mówić, słabe. Wygląda na to, że nie wstrzeliłem się z gamą kolorów oraz że traktuję kontur zbyt dokładnie, zachowawczo, jak 20 lat temu. A przecież nie o to chodzi. Gryzłem się z tą myślą przez jakiś czas, zasięgałem rad mędrców (żony) i w końcu wyszło, że trzeba to wszystko wywalić do kosza i zacząć od nowa. Termin listopadowy już kompletnie odpada.

Tak więc kolejne Rewolucje pojawią się dopiero na targach książki w Warszawie. W sumie ciężko mi znaleźć złe strony takiego przesunięcia premiery. W maju ten komiks będzie dłuższy i lepiej namalowany, ja zaś nie muszę teraz napieprzać po nocach byle tylko zdążyć. Fakt, oznacza to że w tym roku nie będzie Rewolucji, ale w tym roku był już Blaki 4, więc w świetle planu “1 album rocznie” jestem czysty jak łza.

Na marginesie – taka sytuacja zdarzyła mi się wcześniej tylko jeden jedyny raz, przy rozpoczęciu prac nad albumem Rewolucje na Morzu. Wtedy zdaje się byłem bardziej radykalny, już po pierwszych czterech planszach stwierdziłem że to syf i trzeba to wywalić i zrobić od nowa. Dzięki temu album ten wygląda jak wygląda i jest najdłuższą historią jaką kiedykolwiek namalowałem. To wróży dobrze temu nowemu, właśnie zresetowanemu albumowi.

Szczerze mówiąc spadł mi kamień z serca, bo jednak krótkie terminy to zło wcielone. Jak się okazało nie jestem w stanie przeskoczyć swojego trybu “maximum jedna plansza dziennie” – bo i po co. Muszę teraz spokojnie poszukać odpowiedniej kolorystyki i kreski. Mam czas. Przy okazji – ten album prawdopodobnie powstanie jeszcze w tym roku, jeśli nie w całości, to prawie, po prostu wydanie przesuwa się skokowo na czas festiwalu w Warszawie.

Co ciekawe, jednym z czynników które zadecydowały o resecie tego tomu był mój komiks z pierwszego tomu Profanum – Sztorm. Pamiętam że świetnie mi się go malowało, jak go sobie teraz obejrzałem to stwierdziłem że tak – to jest kierunek w którym chcę iść.

Jedno mnie zastanawia, co zrobić z tymi “złymi” planszami – podrzeć i wywalić czy wrzucić do sklepu na sprzedaż po taniości. W końcu bootleg rzecz też cenna.

Poniżej jedna z plansz do wymiany:

Najwyższa pora już zacząć, skoro termin wydania jest ustalony na grudzień. Przy okazji szybkie przegląd jak to się robiło, krok po kroku.

The Subnet just got updated for the last time this year. I achieved this year’s goal of reaching 100 locations (don’t know how many rooms that is, don’t make me count them please). So now it actually is kind of massive, at least compared to other, normal Submachine games. If you want to escape to Submachine – now you can do it for even longer. As the 100-location canvas is set, I’ll start filling it with real gameplay next year, so it will actually become a massive game on it’s own. And it’s 99% HD-ready now, so you’ll be able to buy and own it one day.

As usual – good times ahead, hang on.

Few pictures to get you hooked: