Episode Six: Knowledge | It's Hardly Rocket Science

[witeken]

Although, there is always a risk that Harv will add features like the terrain engine to the demo. Which would actually be quite awesome.

You shouldn\'t have to explain a joke.

He won\'t. A demo is to try it out. If you want better and more features, you need to buy the game. That\'s how it works...

Notch didn\'t update the free version of minecraft when TNT could explode. Or when he doubled the height of the world.

[RC1062]

You shouldn\'t have to explain a joke.

I disagree. Many jokes are jokes because others without the background knowledge don\'t understand it.

[Capt'n Skunky]

Most of the jokes are going to be inside jokes that only someone that already plays the game will get. This is why we sometimes give a little explanation in the post text.

Different people have differing senses of humor, we don\'t expect everyone to 'get' the joke nor find it funny. You can\'t please everyone all the time. What I do know is the over all response has been quite positive so we must be doing something right.

As far as this being a marketing tool for Squad, well, it\'s not endorsed or sponsored by Squad and was never intended to be used that way. We created the comic with existing users in mind, not really to draw people in even though that can be a benefit of the comic.

Thank you for your input. Maybe you should try your hand at doing a web comic.

Cheers!

Capt\'n Skunky

Kerbal Comics

[Linchowlewy]

-Snip-

Thanks for the response. I\'m glad you\'re taking the time to respond to this, as opposed to the Tim Buckley avenue of deleting all criticisms and banning critics from his forums.

I understand that the jokes are obviously going to be game relevant, otherwise there would be no real reason for it to be Kerbal themed. The issue I took was that the joke was a very time specific one. Something which would be known to a smaller population of the game\'s userbase. Furthermore the premise for the tree joke felt poor, which is something I did address.

I do see what you mean, and yes there is positive response because it\'s largely good. Although, Justin Beiber, One Direction and most other pop sensations do also receive large amounts of positive praise. Just remember it\'s important to take constructive criticism, and not just ignore it in favour of the more pleasing comments.

I assumed it was directly affiliated due to the website being run by the community manager for KSP forums, who includes a spruke for it in every post. That would be my mistake, thankyou for clearing that up.

I\'ll pass on attempting a web comic, no point doing something you\'re not enthusiastic about.

EDIT:

http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=321

This is a link to a comic about a historical character in what I assume to be the french revolution. The jokes are about a very specific part of history which I had no knowledge of, yet the jokes are presented in such a way that they are still comprehensible and most importantly funny.

[Sordid]

Thank you for the feedback, it is indeed much appreciated.

As Skunky said, the comic in its entirety is essentially an in-joke and rests upon the premise that the reader knows KSP. Without knowledge of KSP the comic about the kerbals staying alive even when they are \'killed\' doesn\'t make any sense either. That\'s just the premise of it, our target audience is the KSP community. And while we do plan to expand the characters and include some original story arcs, time sensitive in-jokes are always going to be part of the comic, even if they are marginalized somewhat. Which I agree they probably should be, but the introduction of the blueshirts and trees to KSP was too significant to ignore.

I agree that the dialog is too wordy sometimes. I do my best to edit it and cut it down as much as possible, precisely for the reasons you mentioned. But sometimes I fail, such as in the second comic. As for superfluous panels, that I think has more to do with the format. It\'s a four panel comic strip with given image dimensions, it\'s not that simple to change the number of panels. We\'ll see what we can do about that in the future. To answer your question, no the writer and the artist are not the same person. Most of the time at least.

I\'d love if you would continue to provide critique in the future.

[Caesar15]

Nice job

[sgtblazing]

'I always feel like, Somebody\'s watching me!'