rat quest: history of the worlds great est web comic

 rat quest: history of the worlds great est web comic 

"What's the use of looking if you don't see 'em?"

         - Rudimentary Peni (1988)

 

    In 2024, I made a webcomic. It sucked. 

A brief history of homestuck

    In 2009-2016, Homestuck was a webcomic. It sucked.

Why this matters (it doesnt)

    In 2010-present, Microsoft Paint Fan Adventures (mspfa) is an online webcomics hosting website that allows users to freely host and publish their own webcomics, usually fan-fiction or at least derivative of Homestuck or other, better "MS Paint Adventures." It's totally free to use and runs off donations. Sweet deal for a guy like me!

 Cheesed to meat you

    When I first discovered MSP(F)A, my first thought was (obviously): "How do I make this about me?" The answer? Make a webcomic, obviously. My first ideas were simple Homestuck derivatives: A story about a kid stuck in an interdimensional SBURBan TaRDiS gone haywire¹, and a story about a clique of scrappy low-blood anarchists embroiled in a murder show-trial in a who-dunnit turned political thriller turned feel-good slice-of-life with a depressing ending.² Both ideas are obviously not executable at even my current level of competency, but I think that second one is still a good idea to return to at least thirty years after everyone has hopefully forgotten what Homestuck is.

    I'm an alright writer (don't correct me), so there are two barriers to entry: I have no idea how to draw, and I have no idea how to manage a webcomic. MSPFA makes the latter dead simple, but the former is a pain in my ass to this day. What's the solution? Ignore it!

 

    You are currently witnessing the first page of "rat quest" [sic], a 2024 interactive drama series by someone I want very much to forget exists. I made a single recognizable character, later disambiguated and officially canonized as Wall Rat. She's a lesbian. The next step to getting this ball rolling was pressuring someone else to push it for me. This is where the "adventure" part comes in; In traditional MSPA fashion, a significant quantity of webcomics on MSPFA are specifically driven by user comments, exactly like a forum game. Accordingly, I spammed both Homestuck-adjacent Discord servers I inhabited at the time and got a healthy couple of starting commands, including from the great Rosie Ghostopal (commemorated in this horrendous panel), who is still one of my only remaining tenuous social links to the Homestuck fandom. Obviously, it immediately became Half-Life 2.

 

    After dying for the first time, a monumental achievement, players began to progress naturally into the wider house, subtly named for a level in Enter the Gungeon.

 

    In keeping with my primary inspiration of Problem Sleuth, it's here that I introduced some unique, trailblazing, fucking stupid "game" "mechanics," much to the pleasure of everyone involved.

 

 

I still think this inventory system is funny. First of all, it's a thesaurus'd hammerspace. Despite being called a hyperworm, whatever that is, it is clearly a snake. To upgrade the snake, you must add segments of inventory space to it by feeding it apples. I don't remember if I was intentionally evoking that old "JOIN OR DIE" cartoon us Americans love to forget about. In any case, there are layers to my genius.

 

     Next we introduce the other half (originally quarter) of our colorful cast of rodent bastards.

 

 There were gonna be four of them originally! It looked intuitive in the design docs.

 

     Jumping ahead a little bit, party members would give each other mutual equalizing stat boosts through the poorly-thought-out "empathy" mechanic. It's never used again.

 

Here we have the first animated panel of the series, made up of two entire frames and jury-rigged in GIMP, my software of choice at the time. You don't get the text because I can't be assed to do more work than just copy-pasting the GIF itself. Read rat quest. Fuck you.

 

I still like this gag. 

 

This is my favorite panel. It's funnier without the text. And the stolen valor.

 

    After this panel released, I put together a "trailer" for the comic in Clipchamp, Microsoft's proprietary video editor for Windows 11 which somehow manages to be worse than Windows Movie Maker.

 

There was going to be a running gag where rats would have an innate supernatural culinary talent. It's delivered much less subtly in the panel preceding, but I think this one is funnier. Yes, it is a reference to that one movie about the rat that cooks. You know, Ratatoing (2007)?

 

     I was going to introduce the owners of the house at some point. All the items on the shelf tell a story of some kind. I have no idea what it was. Every book is a total non-sequitur from the last. Shout-out to "Dictionary." I'm going to try to remember what that skewed text is. My refusal to anti-alias my transforms properly was really dick-headed for one of the only intentional style choices. I'm pretty sure it's "Go Fuck Yourself: The Only Self-Fucking Book You'll Ever Need." Classy. Maybe the aliasing was for the best. No, I didn't know that was a thing people actually do³ in 2024.

Try to guess what happens in the next panel. 

 

     After violently exploding, players decide to check out the other side of this brilliantly designed binary decision and are greeted with this absolutely inspired scene. This is my second-favorite panel. The upcoming commands imply that it takes very little conditioning for players to immediately recognize any symbolic representation of a rodent as a new playable character. I'd love to employ this for more sinister purposes in the future.

 

That's right, fuck your Konami code. This isn't fucking Contra, it's the final evolution of role-playing games. Achievements are disabled by default. This was intended from the beginning. It's actually quite ingenious if you think about it.

 

     It would have been really funny if the first time players encountered a spider it was an enormous, formless mass completely unrecognizable as a spider unless you turn off arachnophobia. The only way to deal with the enemy would be to know it was a spider. By funny I mean cruel. And by cruel I mean hilarious.

 

    I have no idea what the fuck is going on here. Developer console is implied to be on by default until you use it for the first time, at which point it is permanently un-unlocked (re-locked). What does Negativland do other than reference Neu! for no reason? Seriously, I'm asking you. I don't know.

 

Oh God, this bullshit. I kept track of this in a .txt file, along with pretty much everything else. Jesus.

 

Here are all of the txt files in my dedicated rat quest archive folder I keep forgetting to delete forever.

 

 

 I also like this gag. That thing flying behind her is a monocle, by the way. I skipped past the cosmetics panel.

 

This panel marks the point where I started using an old (LEGALLY-OBTAINED) version of Photoshop over GIMP, the very same version Homestuck used, in fact. This is the only way I know how to do anything right.

 

I made a tongue-in-cheek "art tutorial" soon before the comic's end explaining how to recreate the incredibly intricate design of our beloved protagonist after this, foreshadowing my completely running out of motivation or ideas. Notice how the entire video is completely seamless; This is because it is filmed in one long take, without cuts, just like acclaimed director Stanley Kubrick's famous one-take in horror classic "The Shining."

  

 Nothing important or funny happens after this. It ends abruptly... and childishly. Don't cut me any slack, this was barely one and a half years ago. I was just completely burnt-out (HOLD LAUGHTER). Still am!

 

 Thats right its chrimas mother fucker

     

     It was only a few months later that something magical happened. Okay, something entirely predictable happened. Before the original "series" had time for all the flesh to slough off, I decided to make a rat quest christmas special. Best idea I've ever had, I know. Even better than becoming a misanthrope at age twelve.

Behold the inciting panel of "a cheesemas story." That's right, we're animated now! CS3's animation is surprisingly easy to parse, especially for someone like me (derogatory). I still like this one. The way everything lags is very lifelike, I think. Don't quote me on that. Quote someone else on it. Also, DOOM reference, haha, LOL, thanks for the gold kind stranger

 

Notice how the cursor only clicks a single time! My immersion is fucking shattered and I'm putting this in my suicide note.

 

 "a cheesemas story" was widely criticized for its awful load times, usually upwards of literally forever. That's right, this is the last panel. I spent the following week trying to make an animation in an old version of Adobe Flash. No update, no notice, nothing. Just labelled it as inactive and slinked (slunk?) away like a little coward. Over a year later, here we are.

 

 

Here's the current draft of the animation. It's kind of pathetic. I really didn't learn my lesson the first go round: Don't start something before you can finish it. Or at least fully fucking start it. Dickweed. 

 

 

I used music by Lacheque for this. She's very good, but unfortunately not all that active these days. She'll probably come up again if I ever write a blog post about *shudders* my Soundcloud days. 

Who fucking cares man. oh my god

Hey, you're the one reading this. Although, I'm the one writing this, which is arguably worse. Anyway, that's the story so far. I may revisit rat quest in some form in the future. It is, admittedly, a key point in my development as an """"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""artist."""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" I know how embarrassing that is. I know how embarrassing THIS is. I don't care. I'm showing my full, entire ass (please imagine I actually linked to goatse) here, and it's your job to lap it up like a starving Great Dane.

 

Ultimately, I don't know what to think of rat quest. Was it funny? Kind of, sometimes. Was it anything else? I don't know. But, perhaps most importantly, was it IMPORTANT to ME? Not really.

 

I appreciate any and all support for my creative ambitions. Barring restaurant napkins I really don't want to go to the trouble of recovering, here's the last piece of rat quest content ever produced.

 

 

 

1  ...creatively titled "TaRDiStuck," which sounds more like what the machine in question was doing in series 6, episode 4, or perhaps my answer to "describe your current general living situation in three words or less"^↩

2 ...uncreatively titled "Leave the Lantern Lit," which is entirely unrelated to the story in any way.^↩

3 You just got Kranged.^↩