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WHAT IS HOMESTUCK?
It's a story about some kids who are friends over the internet. They decide to play a game together. There are major consequences.
Illustration by Lexxy.
Saying anything more about the plot here would probably be getting in too deep. It gets fairly complicated. One of the goals was to begin with extremely simple, mundane circumstances, and allow reader participation combined with some preplanned elements to grow the story quickly and spontaneously, into something much bigger, more dynamic, and more intricate as a natural result of this approach.
Page 1 of Homestuck.
The video trailer on the Kickstarter page gives you a sense of what I mean by "more dynamic." The story contains many sequences animated in Flash, though this is not the prevailing type of content in Homestuck. Most pages are a single panel, often with some minor looping animation, with text underneath. If you watch the trailer, and then click on the first page, you may wonder if you even are looking at the same story. This is what I meant by starting with simple circumstances, and building on them. A story that begins with some crudely drawn panels of a boy wandering around his house, very gradually, achieves liftoff in scope and presentation. As hard as it might be to believe from reading the first few panels, everything in that trailer takes place in the story later on in a meaningful context.
Closer to what Homestuck's like now.
While the story includes hours of animation, and thousands of relatively static panels, the overarching experience is actually more similar to reading a book. There's a good deal of dialogue between characters, as they chat to each other over the internet during their adventure. The result is an unusual media hybrid. Something that reads like a heavily illustrated novel, frequently interrupted by cinematic Flash sequences, and sometimes even interactive games. It's a story I've tried to make as much a pure expression of its medium as possible.
This is a "Pesterlog." There are a whole lot of these.
Reader participation was a major part of this. The whole story is presented in the form of a mock-game that the reader "plays." We start with the hero John, and the "player" tells him what to do, by way of text commands from classic adventure games. Readers submitted these commands, and I picked ones I liked, and drew the result. Creating it was a lot like being the Dungeon Master of an RPG involving thousands of people, dealing with a similar balance of planning and improvisation. Readers have had a lot of influence on the way the story unfolded, in more ways than just submitting commands. The story is really a kind of dialogue between the readers and author. There is always a sense that the story is aware of the individual reader, and the readership overall. Much the way an adventure game tends to be cognizant of the player.
There's a sidebar to the reader commands issue: after a year, I stopped accepting them. This was mostly because the readership had gotten too big. That author/reader dialogue that is so lively and amusing with a group of several thousand people is less so with a million, not to mention impractical. And so the way the story was made continued to evolve. I took the reins on story commands, but continued incorporating reader input in other ways. That author/reader dialogue shifted to become more of a conversation between author and fandom. The story began expressing its awareness of the reader more through acknowledgment of the phenomenon that was emerging.
These are "Homestucks." They like to dress up in funny clothes.
Homestuck was made quickly. In three years, it's averaged five pages per day. The process was designed for speed. Simple drawings, posted as quickly as they were produced, to keep the interplay with the readership alive and as active as possible, and to make rapid progress on a large story involving many ideas. Most of these ideas were meant to manifest along the way. It wasn't about bringing something fully realized into existence, but to find out what it was going to become given a process with certain ground rules. And I wanted to find out sooner rather than later! So I spent almost every moment I had working on it.
Finally, as much as there is to say about Homestuck as an exploration of media, it's above all a work of comedy. You'll likely enjoy the story in direct proportion with how much you enjoy the sense of humor. It heavily involves satire of internet culture, various game genres and systems, and most fundamentally, adventure games. The entire format is based on a parody of text-based and point-and-click adventure games, which is probably even more evident in the story preceding Homestuck, Problem Sleuth.
This is Problem Sleuth. Many of the ideas in Homestuck emerged from this story, which used the same reader-driven format. It's much shorter than Homestuck, and probably more accessible if you're looking to get a feel for the type of humor and mock-gameplay these stories involve.
These stories were built on this tradition of affectionate satire of these types of games. So making a true adventure game, and bringing similar kinds of ideas and humor to that medium, strikes me as a logical next step after Hometuck is finished. I hope you will consider helping to fund this project!
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←对于那些Homestuck狂热者的cosplay，不明内容的路人往往都是这个表情wwwww
