Well, this sure has been an exciting Saturday!

We decided to start advertising on GG-Guys.com and TheSlackerz.com, some webcomics we enjoy reading, with the goal of sucking their readers from them with our comic.  We noticed quite quickly, however, that site performance was suffering with only a load of a few hundred users per day.

We made the decision to move the site to a Linode Virtual Machine, and I, Shawn, started making preparations.  And somehow in the process the Missing Number Comics on Dreamhost completely borked itself.  And a DNS entry was entered incorrectly.  And as errors compounded onto cached errors, I lost more and more of my sanity!

The curse of Missing Number has struck again!

But if you are reading this post, and seeing this comic, then your DNS has finally cleared itself and you are now seeing our shiny new site.  Doesn’t look like much change on the face, but I guarantee you, we went from clogged Volkswagen Bug to Joint Strike Fighter on the inside, with an easy ramp up to even more power if necessary.

So, when we begin our advertising again, it’ll be with a site that works   Thanks for your patience!

One final note, now that the ranting has died down, our local sprite artist produced the two sprites which appear in the second frame, from hand, without using a Pokemon base sprite:

Why redraw these guys if they’re pretty much the characters from Fire Red/Leaf Green?  Details.  The costume details for the Fire Red and Leaf Green male and female player characters don’t exactly match our Male Player Character and Female Player Character.  And we wanted to make it obvious that these sprites and characters were ours, not just similar versions of well known characters (like our rendition of Naruto).  I would put Male Player Character and Female Player Character into the “Original” character column.  Of course, you’ve only seen these guys as sprites, but I can assure you that when they appear in the comic, their uniqueness WILL appear!

This is Part 1 of a three issue series! Tune in Saturday for Part 2!

This one has been floating around for a bit.  When this comic was first proposed, we thought about the console-de-jour for the characters.  We didn’t want a F@NBOY$ situation, with a specific user for each console.  We didn’t want to really emulate any of the gaming comics out there (as we don’t see ourselves as a generic “Gaming Comic.”)

So, it was decided that the three main characters David, Chris, and Ashley would be Diehard Nintendo Fans (witness Dave’s Nintendo Shop), but that other consoles would have their say (Except for the PS3, which is evil).

Even the Virtual Boy comes into play!

We try to reduce our comics to 128 colors;  both to save bandwidth/load time, and also it gives the comic a specific, Game Boy Advance effect.  However, for this one (the dramatic lightning scene, the swooshes, the glowing EVIL, etc) he had to not only bump that up to 256 colors, but also turn on dithering.  Dithering is something we rarely use, mainly because it make everything speckly;  we prefer solid fields of colors.  But, sometimes, the purity of art must be sacrificed for the presentation.

Do enjoy this issue.  It’s a setup for a couple of guest issues, so be sure to turn in next week!

(Sorry for the lateness of the update;  one of Team Missing Number is getting married, so we threw a “Bachelor Party” at Main Event;  we played way too much laser tag and Dance Dance Revolution.  And we had WAY too many Energy Drinks.  And we miscalculated our return time )