Index :: Characters of the old CCK version (2005)

Below you see the whole set of once available figures. Not included here are a dozen that showed friends and housemates from that time, but those would be irrelevant for a web version anyway.

The quality of these GIFs is quite mediocre, in particular the coloured ones - didn't use the best truecolor->palette converter. That's why the biggest part is in grayscale format. The jagged edges (and even the background bleed here and there) were a tolerable flaw, as they gave it a retro touch. In a modern version, PNG would of course be the prefered solution: delivering soft borders, continuous opacity levels for all sorts of semi transparent areas and, also important, a reduced file size.

In the beginning I wildly produced a decent amount of (what I considered funny) sprites to make my friends have a basic character list to choose from. At least the production process - image conversion, defining transparent areas, making left- and right-side versions - was challenging and fun.

Down the road, only around 20 of the characters have ever been used, and mostly for mere testing purposes. Though everyone was amused and enjoyed the results, almost nobody had the time, inspiration, artistic ability or the right mindset to produce comic strips themselves. And not to forget, my old strip editor was rather bulky; a nice database and php on the backend, but a rather traditional form based interface (filling out fields for properties) with very little javascript drag'n'drop realtime interaction on the frontend.

In a nutshell, this project was a great experience (especially image preparation), although the actual use and results didn't come up to our expectations - because in the end we had released, I think, only a handful of strips altogether.