YEAH....... it's been 2 years since I made a legit update. I'm definitely definitely definitely still working on it regularly, I just don't update anymore is because a) I change and scrap shit a lot (which I haven't been doing so much in the past 6 months!), and b) I felt like I was blowing smoke up your ass and was talking about the thing more than actually working on the thing, so I decided to just stop updating altogether and direct all my energy towards, just... working on it little by little every day.

I KNOW THAT "hey dont worry ive been working on it these past 2 years lol!" ISN'T MUCH OF A REASSURANCE SO HERE IS A (rough) TIMELINE OF HOW I'VE BEEN SPENDING MY TIME:


After that last update (the one with all the main character designs), I spent a few months practicing my art style because that shit still wasn't satisfactory to me. Some progress was made after that.
Around June 2014, I stopped drawing as much (only practicing basic anatomy and coloring coloring technique instead of the actual characters or any Xenos/Predators/Engineers/etc) and turned my focus to research and writing practice; this went on till, like... December, I think.
It was around July where I showed you my current progress - the Xeno, the big Bat Motherfuckers, etc. I changed the bats' names to TEROPTERID (turr-RAWP-turrid), but the design I showed you is their final design.
SO MUCH RESEARCH WAS DONE and I'm STILL researching a lot. Stuff like the different cultures of my characters (the characters are Filipino, Nigerian, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Indian, British, American, etc); ancient mythology (mostly Filipino, Japanese, Greek, Chinese, and Vietnamese); military history/ranks/basic knowledge/etc (mostly American and British); reading a bunch of different theories for the Engineers and the black goo (which I'm calling Miracle Matter); linguistics and language evolution; ancient literature (for all those super sweet allusions); and PROBABLY THE MOST IMPORTANT THING, fashion (as in, what the fuck are my characters gonna look like)
In December 2014, I scrapped ALL my old designs and redrew the most important ones first. I drew the near-final designs of all seven Elders and all seven Alpha Males (and they're only near-final rather than 100% final because I might make a SLIGHT adjustment on one or two of them - otherwise, they're good to go and just need to be recolored in my current art style (they hadn't been colored because at that point I still hated my art)), making that 14 drawings in about a week. I still like these drawings a lot.
After that, I started making rough drafts of all the other Predators and Xenos, but they're still in the rough draft stage because soon after that I decided to go back to researching and writing practice.
It was a lot more drawing and writing practice than research for the next few months. I think this lasted till March?
In March~April 2015, I then scrapped all my old writing and recreated the main characters to better fit the new narrative. The new version of the characters and the story is at a much better point than the old versions ever were; I've pieced together a kind of long and detailed (but still rough) outline of the major events and am in the process of writing (some very goddamned long) character sheets, which helps me change and refine the story's outline and also helps me give some meaningful depth to the characters' stories.
In May 2015, I began seriously drawing again with little to no research or writing practice to get in the way. That doesn't mean I'm done with research, it just means I started really, really cracking down on developing an art style I'm proud of (and I'm close, if I'm not already there).
I also got a Wacom 21UX Drawing Monitor around this time, which is way better than that weak shit I used to draw with.
In July, with their backstories, personalities, and attributes/quirks pretty much established, I decided to redesign the main characters from scratch (mostly to look more realistic and less anime-ish). As of right now, only half of them have been redesigned because I'm a perfectionist bitch that takes forever to decided on a look.
SO MUCH ONLINE CLOTHES SHOPPING
Right now, I'm still just practicing anatomy/coloring. This shit takes so much time, it's really outrageous.
I draw all the time for hours at a time and most of the time it's just anatomy and coloring.
I don't write nearly as much, but I have more confidence in my writing that I do my art.
I haven't done much research since August.
I'm gonna be honest with you: This is so far removed from any actual A/P film/comic that I can only describe it as "What if... WHAT IF... Final Fantasy VI... but with AVP?"

"What IF... plus anime?"

"WHAT IF... PLUS SUPER HERO NARRATIVE"


This is either too little or too much effort to be putting into a fan-fic (and most pro authors write bigger stories in 6 months) but that's because I severely underestimated what it takes to write a comic in the kind of style I want to be producing it in.

THINGS YOU CAN ASK ME ABOUT:


The story and what it has to do with AVP
The characters
Your characters
SUPER HEROES?


Edit: Oh, yeah: I want to show you guys my progress by the end of December. That's my goal. I'm hoping to show you a bunch of art of the characters, the world, the Predators and Aliens, and also the Engineers and all the freaky Engineer shit I made up (including the Teropterids, the dragons, etc). I don't know if I want to post my writing here, since (for some ungodly fucking reason) I wrote it all in the style of TV Tropes pages. It's really just... for me. I can summarize all of it for you guys if you wanna see where I'm going with the story and the character development.

Man, what a mess of a post. I hope that makes sense, I had no idea where to start.

" THINGS YOU CAN ASK ME ABOUT:


The story and what it has to do with AVP
The characters
Your characters
SUPER HEROES? "


I wouldn't mind wondering about my character and how it fits into the plot. I'm not expecting to be a main, character or even a plot device or anything if that nature, but I am wondering how you're gonna have us all be cameos. Having so many people make cameos has to be perhaps the hardest aspect of this project.

I'm glad that this didn't fall into the abyss. Looking forward to your next major update, keep moving forward Bloo.

Yeah, sadly none of you are main characters - this has gone from being a story about you guys to being a story that is about something else but still has you guys in it. The highest ranking members have a lot of story significance, though, and all of the active members here have frequent cameos. The high ranking members + staff/clan staff have really unique designs. The lower ranking members don't have unique designs other than slightly different color schemes that lets you know that it's you (UNLESS you've given me a design to work with, like SR did). Most of the Xeno members are just normal Drones and Warriors.

How it works is, the Predators don't prominently show up until half way through the first arc. The Aliens show up even later than that. Monsters made from the black goo are present from the beginning, including both ones seen in Prometheus and some original ones I made up (like the bat-hole-in-mouth guy). When you guys DO show up, I hope you'll know it's you - just make note of whatever design I'll be posting in the other thread.

None of you die until the end either, which means you guys show up quite a bit whenever Predators and Aliens are relevant (which is a lot in the second half of the story).

Even the human members aren't main characters. Peterson and DW's Xeuss have plot importance though, and the rest of the DBO and Alpha Draconis do make cameos. All the high ranking members temporarily "join" the party at various points; even though they never strictly team up, there are parts where the Elder members (Stalker, DD, etc) interact with and fight alongside the main characters. The human x Predator relationship never goes full on AVP though - I'm fully intending to make the Predators villains here (even more than the Engineers, who are actually pretty tragic here). I just think Enemy Mine situations are really interesting.

As for the actual main characters - they're all "original" characters that are my own versions of different characters appearing in different franchises. If you've ever heard of Kill Shakespeare, it's like that - I'm taking different characters and putting them in the same universe where their stories intertwine in weird ways. Except, these characters don't have the names of the characters they're supposed to be because they're also mixes of many different characters. I'll elaborate more on that when I actually update. No, none of these characters are superheroes, but there are "heroes," there's a Rogues Gallery, there's a big dumb fantastical plot, etc. The main franchises I'm mixing together are Aliens, Predator 2, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Ergo Proxy, and Blood: The Last Vampire. The main characters of those are pretty much the main characters of my story.

From my outline:

"[This Project] is an animesque fan-fiction web-comic that takes the Alien Film Universe, the Predator Film Universe, the Ghost in the Shell Multiverse, and the Ergo Proxy Universe and mixes them all together with traits of Blood: the Last Vampire and the Aliens Versus Predator Expanded Universe to make a Final Fantasy-inspired graphic novel. [...] Much of the established back story heavily draws from and relies on Prometheus. Knowledge of those stories isn't required to enjoy [This Project]. "

I realize that sounds weird, but I swear it's gonna be great.

Sorry to hijack your thread but reading this reminded me of my Midian "Vampire Yautja" character. I hadn't given much thought at that point as to why exactly it had the properties that it did, but now that I think about it, I can probably come up with some pseudoscience for it.

For example, the vampire yautja's (or "Porphyroth" as I called it back then because I thought it sounded cool, but now I'm not so sure) "blood" was almost perfectly black, as in it did not reflect almost any wavelength of light. I remember I described the bloodstains and the wounds of the porphyroth as appearing noticeably dark even in darkness. I think I also said that the porphyroth would appear black on heat vision, which wouldn't make sense because something that absorbs light gives off a lot of heat. So the only solution would be that the light absorbed by the blood is somehow extremely efficiently converted into an energy that is used by... something. I think I remember, though this could be from something else, that I said the black "blood" was some sort of virus that had replaced the yautja's entire bloodstream and that the porphyorth had to consume whole chunks of predator in order to survive, not just to suck the blood out, but to eat a good hefty three meals of raw predator a night.



So this is what I'm thinking. Predators experiment to create a self-sufficient regenerative technology, working with the black goo. The experiments result in this promising substance that absorbs light very efficiently and can sustain itself by absorbing it directly through the skin. But for some reason they're in a hurry, so instead of testing it properly they go directly to testing it on a few yautja subjects. The substance is terribly imperfect, however - the light absorption rate is much greater than needed, the programming is nowhere near as good as they though - and instead of co-existing with the native blood, it starts to replace the entire bloodstream, making the subjects constantly hungry (because the entire natural healing process has been replaced with the extremely rapid but much more resource demanding healing done by the new blood, mortally sensitive to sunlight (because even though the light absorption is efficient, it is much more efficient than the nanobots need it to be, so in bright light the black blood will release so much heat that the body will start to decay beyond the blood's ability to heal it).

One thing the scientists underestimated when developing the black blood was the black goo's affinity for DNA manipulation. They were counting on it to become something that could be transferred from predator to predator easily on the battlefield and once inside a new host body to recognize the slight difference in DNA and not turn the accepting body into a clone of the donor, but at the same time work to keep the DNA at its best, as in to counter the aging process. Unfortunately, once the black blood takes over the bloodstream and the hunger starts, it will begin to interact directly with the food in an attempt to make the digestive process more efficient and taking information from whatever DNA it finds there into account when repairing the main body, so in this case, you literally are what you eat. So if my character had a pair of bat-like wings, it means he had consumed enough of a creature that has that feature for the blood to consider it a necessary addition to the host body's DNA.

Of course, this was not the reason that they started eating other yautja, this was discovered only after. It was the intense hunger that prompted the initial cannibalism.

So:

>the predators tried to make use of the black goo and turn it into an agent that bonds with the host and regenerates wounds

>they hurried the tests and used it on predator subjects too early

>this resulted in an extremely unstable creature with the following properties:

>almost perfectly black blood, appears as a textureless void when viewed with light detection technology

>if by any means this blood reaches the bloodstream of another predator, it will inevitably take over (effects on humans are unknown)

>cannot survive in intense light due to overheating

>are cold enough in dim light to appear black when viewed with heat detection technology

>are constantly hungry and in pain due to this hunger

>though they do not need to specifically eat other predators, it is preferable if they want to avoid severe mutations

>eating any other creature will likely result in mutations that bring them to a closer likeness to the eaten creatures

>avoiding to eat anything other than predators is pretty much impossible due to the constant acute hunger, so every subject will have suffered some sort of mutation soon after the black blood has take over

>failing to feed regularly will result in a much more rapid death by starvation than a normal predator would experience

>constant pain due to hunger will most likely cause the subject to succumb to any number of different forms of insanity

>in time, the black blood will replace all of the material of the body with itself in an attempt to increase efficiency, but due to lack of resources this will only cause the subject to dissolve into a mass of black goo



So given that we've often had the same idea separately, have you thought of anything very similar to this?

Oh wow, that's similar to the Bad Bloods in my story.

There are two major groups of Predators: a small clan called the Seven Headed Dragon (which is made up of the members on this site) and a much larger clan called the Thirty Tyrants (which is entirely made up of my own Predator characters). They didn't give themselves these names, this is just what the humans call them. The Thirty Tyrants are supposedly the Bad Bloods for most of the story, but then (plot twist!) the Seven Headed Dragon turns out to be full of manipulative assholes who don't side with humans at all, they're just using them to kill off the Tyrants (which they do, and it's kind of hilarious) and to obtain the four different versions of the Black Goo from them. (I made up the other three kinds of goo - you don't need to know about them for now. Just know that there's black, white, yellow, and red).

Anyway: the Thirty Tyrants are presented as evil brutes. They're adamant about keeping the old traditions of their culture intact while the Dragons insist that things should keep moving forward. Ironically, it's the Dragons who use traditional (old) equipment while the Tyrants use some really tricked out tech.

In my story, normal predators have different blood colors according to the electromagnetic spectrum (in which green bloods are the most common). These colors don't determine the social hierarchy, but they're like different skin colors, so of course they still determine social standing. The Dragons all have these different blood colors. The Tyrants, however, have a really abnormal blood color - black, white, yellow, or red, depending on which goo they were infected with. Black is the most common. They don't need to literally eat their prey like your Porphyroths do, but they DO assimilate their prey through whatever part of their body happens to be touching their prey (which is mostly the hands), and they don't need to do this often. None of their bodies are their original bodies, so because their bodies are made of the goo, they have Particle-Wave Matter bodies (which, in this case, is basically an organic version of solid light). They share this feeding process with every black goo monster except the Xenomorphs, who don't need to feed.

The four elders of the Tyrants are the only ones who have red blood. The color red is a really rare mutation among normal Predators, so they're basically the worst kind of abomination you can imagine. Coincidentally, Death Drop has red blood and was an outcast for this.

A Tyrant's body can regenerate quickly and can take even more abuse than a normal Predator's can. Their technology is on par with the Engineers' in which they have a very biomechanical aesthetic to them. They can't manipulate their bodies well enough to emulate different life forms and they can't shapeshift, but they can infect other organisms. Their bodies are completely pale and their skin is like a blank slate. They're still recognizable as Predators, though.

This all happened because of their contact with the Engineers. Rather than straight up stealing their shit, they used it as a base to make their own innovations and inventions. Their bodies are very similar to Engineer bodies.

They don't experience constant pain, but it's so amazing that you thought that up because the giant bats do, in fact, experience constant, unbearable pain, and they DO eat their prey rather than assimilate them. The bats are what happens when an infected human is left to mutate for decades. If the Fifield zombie in Prometheus lived for a few more decades, he would have become a full black goo monster even stronger than the hammerpedes or the trilobite. They aren't bats, really - they're just supposed to be my version of the Chiropterans from Blood: The Last Vampire, which ARE vampires.

Fuck, its been HOW long?

Man, I remember when this was a homestuck thing (I think PoN kida... dissuaded you from the idea, alot). Anyway, still sounds interesting as fuck.

How intelligent are the black liquid monsters, by the way? Are they near/above the host, or are they more primal?

They're about the same as Xenomorphs. There are other ones that have the "Ghosts" (minds) of Engineers planted into them; those ones are much smarter than humans. Predictably, the goo monsters that have Ghosts are the high ranking Xeno members on this site (Dave, Donut, Fire Hunter, etc), but there are other super-powerful ones called the Seven Sisters that were used by the Engineers as a last-resort defense against planetary threats.

There are also human-made black goo monsters called Proxies that have artificial Ghosts in them. Those ones are smarter than humans but dumber than the Seven Sisters. The Proxies can manipulate their Particle-Wave Matter bodies to take on the appearance of a normal human. Thankfully they're not hostile, they just want to be left alone.

The Proxies are the same thing as the bats. The only difference is that they have Ghosts and have full control of their abilities.

Looking forward to seeing this progress update. And really crossing my fingers on whether or not my character will be shown at some point in time even for just a panel xD

Man that sounds like a whole lot of complicated. I hope you have a good way of consolidating individual stories and knowing what to leave as just lore.

That's something I'm currently working on with the character sheets and the outline in general. I don't want to lay info dump upon info dump on the reader, nor do I want the reader to feel like they should have to watch every show/movie that I'm mixing together, so I wanted to reveal all this stuff at a good pace. One of the biggest problems with that is that there's just so much goddamn lore that I'm mixing together that it seems impossible with just one main character, which is where the superhero narrative and the Rogues Gallery comes in. Each member of what eventually becomes the main party (a party of 12 characters) has their own individual journey in the first half of the story where they all interact with the two main characters in some way. Each of their arcs introduces either one of the different franchises and that respective franchise's mythology and also ties together each previous arc so that it's clear it's all apart of one giant narrative rather than just a bunch of random, unrelated stories.

For example, the first thing that gets introduced is the two main characters and all the original stuff I made up. Things like solid light manipulation, a science called Atomism that revolves around the study and application of solid light, and the black goo monsters is introduced. Mind you, none of this is explained in full at the very beginning - just enough so that it's not confusing. The presence of the Predators is also felt here (and one of the Thirty Tyrants is directly responsible for starting one of the main characters' journey), but they don't get formally introduced until the next arc. What gets established here is the main characters, the general lore, the atmosphere, and the very first antagonist in the gallery (who ends up being very important later). All 12 of the main party is seen at some point here, but they're either not terribly important or they don't show up long enough to be considered a main character.

In the next section, the Predators get officially introduced. The traditional Predator stuff comes first and doesn't take long to show. Most of this portion of the story revolves around the Thirty Tyrants, how they're so different from the other Predators, why there's beef between the two factions, etc. The idea of the black goo and that there are different goos gets introduced here, but it was already alluded to in the first part. The next two major characters are also prominent in this arc.

It keeps going on like that. One arc formally introduces an idea or aspect while the arc before it foreshadows it. I don't explain everything outright; I want to show just enough that it makes sense, but I want to leave enough open so that the reader has room to speculate and draw their own conclusions about how some of the stuff works.

It's also not that formulaic - it's a pretty long story, so I don't want the story to become predictable and for the reader to get bored - but I don't have more time to write about it at the moment. I might edit this post later.

EDIT: OKAY.

I actually could do it with one character who would go on to experience the whole thing on their own, but I've always liked the trope where a bunch of superheroes, who are normally alone, have to band together to fight a bigass threat. It's much more exciting, you get to see a lot of different kinds of badasses do things together, and it amplifies the threat of the thing they're fighting against. It's just exciting to me. And it doesn't necessarily happen in just superhero comics - that's why my biggest inspiration is Final Fantasy, and that's why I'm putting a bunch of unrelated franchises together. Complicated as it might be, I'm really enjoying how much shit I'm pulling together.

Well there aren't many ways to insult me personally, but ya finally did it. Ya wrote "apart of" instead of "a part of". I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY NOW


Anyway that sounds pretty good. It also reminds me I should finish that storytelling course sometime.

FUCK

I think I actually made like 8 typos in the last few posts, but whatever. Anyway, thanks.

I've spent the last few days trying to think if an intelligent, informed, and articulated response.

But all I can really think of is "OHMAHGAWDOHMAHGAWDOHMAHGAWDOHMAHGAWDOHMAHGAWD!!!!", I'm just too excited to really be able to think.

It's really cool that you're excited even though I didn't post anything new. I'm also really excited even though I didn't post anything new.

I wish I could devote all my time to this. It's been a lot of fun.

BLOO. Y U NO UPDATE.

BLOO-Y ARE YOU OKAY? BLOO-Y ARE YOU OKEY? ARE YOU OKAY BLOOY?

BLOO-Y ARE YOU OKAY? WOULD TELL US? THAT YOU'RE OKAY?

(I'm kidding. Take your time, brah.)

...SOON. IT'LL BE A LATE CHRISTMAS BUT SOON.

@DD: Speaking of people advertising their own shit, Christmas is gonna come really late with that comic update.

This is the millionth time I've said this but don't expect anything from that for a while. I swear to god I'm working on it whenever I can. And that doesn't just mean "twice for twenty minutes every four months lol" -- I'm actually on it like, all the time, but I overestimated how much I gave myself to do for this so it's just been pretty slow. I don't like making excuses but school and work just really gets in the way of me playing with my imaginary friends all day.

I don't know if I said this before but the overall plot's been finished for a while. The big picture stuff's all good and it's constantly being elaborated upon until I have a completed narrative. The main 8 Xenos (1. Dave, 2. Bug-Hunt, 3. Fire Hunter, 4. Death Wraith, 5. Donut, 6. Iseijin, 7. Vampyrik, and 8. Killswitch) + the main 8 Predators (1. Doctor, 2. PREDATORv2, 3. Black Warrior, 4. Concrete Hunter, 5. Stalker, 6. Wolf (Cory), 7. Death Drop, and 8. Cetanu) + the big bat guys have had full-body designs for a long time, so for the past few months I've just been turning the plot into a story.

So the plot's done and the story's being edited almost every day, but it's going really slow... especially since I somehow ended up having to write 12 main characters who all have their own arcs, so it feels like I'm writing 12 different comics. My ambition really does not match up with my schedule. Sometimes I quit for the day because I'm like, "Dude, it's a web comic. A fan-fiction web comic. Who's gonna care about this besides you? Why are you putting so much effort into this?" But that only lasts for a few hours before I go, "Well, if nothing else, it's good experience."

When I eventually update -- and I WILL update, I'm not abandoning this project -- I want it to be more visual than all the last updates. Lots of art of the 12 main characters, the Aliens, the Predators, the Giger things, the giant bat guy, your guys' RPG characters (because that was the original focus and it's still a big part of this), but also concept art of the world this is taking place in as well as that weird solid light thing I keep talking about. And this isn't me just talking, I already have some of this art done. I have less than half of it, admittedly, but I'm definitely working on it. I just don't wanna show you yet because I might get rid of some of it or I might change it or... whatever. It has to be all part of the same big package.

I also wanna upload all of this to a separate site like DeviantART or Tumblr (suggestions??) so that I have a good online collection of it. Uploading all of it to this website -- the artwork, at least -- would be kinda cluttered, I feel like. So there you go. Sorry there's no art this time (which makes it two years in a row, I think), but when there IS new art, I hope it impresses you guys. I've been practicing a lot.

TL;DR For this next update, I have more planned this time around than what I did in the past so that's why it's going slow. Ideally, what I want to include in the next update is character art, concepts of the world, and artwork of the monsters and of the technology and weapons... as well as some brief descriptions of all those things. Nothing like the bigass encyclopedia I was trying to write before. SO it'd be like a visual dictionary or something. And it's all gonna be on a separate site. Maybe a blogging platform, IDK.

Hey, don't worry about it, take your time. I am probably not going to die, ever, so you can be sure I'll at least live to see this even if you complete it 200 years from now.

I know it's been like almost 3 years since the last post in this thread, but I was wondering if you were still working on it at all?